The Immigrants Read Online Free PDF Page A

and it consumed four square miles of San Francisco. From the waterfront to Van Ness Avenue to Dolores Street to 20th Street to Howard and to Bryant and then over to the Southern Pacific Depot and then down to the bay again, wiping out the Barbary Coast and the homes of the poor and homes of the rich, too, and the new seven-million-dollar city hall and schools and libraries and churches, five hundred and twenty-one square blocks, over twenty-eight thousand buildings, and almost four hundred human beings dead in the ashes. And for weeks thereafter, smoke rose from the ruins.
    Yet in every tragedy, no matter how great, no matter how per-vading, there are the lucky and the unlucky. Anthony Cassala was one of the lucky ones. His small frame house, on Folsom Street beyond the edge of the fire-burned area, was almost undisturbed by the earth quake and untouched by the flames. He was a decent human being, reasonably clever yet at the same time rather simple, and he thanked God devoutly for his good fortune. He believed in all sincerity that he had been spared for a reason, and since his only function which might constitute a reason was to lend money, he accepted that function. The catastrophe was too enor mous for him to probe any deeper into cause and rea son.
    Three days after the earthquake, when the first mo ments of sanity began to return to the ruined city, An thony Cassala considered himself and his circumstances. He had cash assets of almost eighteen
     
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    hundred dollars in his home, which was more cash than most of the wealthiest citizens had at that moment. The poor had nothing but the few dollars in their pockets, if indeed they had not been burned out. Those who were burned out had nothing at all—only the robes and trousers and pajamas they were lucky enough to wrap around them.
    For the great banks of San Francisco, the great repo sitories of money and power and wealth, were almost all located within the area that had been burned. Crocker National Bank, Wells Fargo, the California Bank—all or them buried under debris and burned timbers, their vaults sealed shut by the heat, metal safes twisted and melted. These and other giants of high finance con ferred with each other, with city and government and army officials, and took measures to keep the burned-out city alive. At Anthony Cassala’s house, where al ready twenty-two human souls were being given refuge and food by his wife, Maria, things functioned on a smaller and more intimate scale. The Italian working people who had fled from their homes half-naked, tak ing nothing with them in their terror as the earth heaved and rolled, wanted for the most essential and immediate necessities, clothing and food and survival for the next hours—and many of them turned to Anthony Cassala.
    So on this Saturday morning, three days after the earthquake struck, he sat at his kitchen table with his son, Stephan, beside him.
    Stephan had a pen and an open ledger. Anthony had a pile of bills and silver dol lars in front of him, the dwindling remains of some eighteen hundred dollars in cash which he had hidden in his house when the earthquake struck. He was doling it out five and ten and twenty dollars at a time, while Stephen entered the name of each borrower in the ledger. By half-past eight in the morning, the money was gone. There remained only a list of names in the ledger and the gigantic confusion of a house packed full of homeless people, men, women, and many, many chil dren.
     
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    There remained also a notion that had come to An thony Cassala during all of this—that if these poor working people had left their money with him, some how it would be available to them now.
    He said to him self that as soon as things quieted down and the city became a place to live in once more, he would find out something about banks. He felt a desperate need to be alone and to think. He said to his son, “Everyone comes here but