“I have money,” she said, “‘if I could get it and use it. I have property, if I could realize on it. I have friends, if I could get to them. Meantime I am going to cook this piece of bacon on bricks and be happy.”
She was only one of thousands like her.
In a walk through the city this note of cheerfulness of the people in the face of an almost incredible week of horror was to a correspondent the mitigating element to the awfulness of disaster.
In the streets of the residential district in the western addition, which the fire did not reach, women of the houses were cooking meals on the pavement. In most cases they had moved out the family ranges, and were preparing the food which they had secured from the Relief Committee.
Out on Broderick street, near the Panhandle, a piano sounded. It was nigh ten o’clock and the stars were shining after the rain. Fires gleamed up and down through the shrubbery and the refugees sat huddled together about the flames, with their blankets about their heads, Apache-like, in an effort to dry out after the wetting of the afternoon. The piano, dripping with moisture, stood on the curb, near the front of a cottage which had been wrecked by the earthquake.
A youth with a shock of red hair sat on a cracker box and pecked at the ivories. “Home Ain’t Nothing Like This” was thrummed from the rusting wires with true vaudeville dash and syncopation. “Bill Bailey,” “Good Old Summer Time,” “Dixie” and “In Toyland” followed. Three young men with handkerchiefs wrapped about their throats in lieu of collars stood near the pianist and with him lifted up their voices in melody. The harmony was execrable, the time without excuse, but the songs ran through the trees of the Panhandle, and the crows, forgetting their misery for a time, joined the strange chorus.
The people had their tales of comedy, one being that on the morning of the fire a richly dressed woman who lived in one of the aristocratic Sutter Street apartments came hurrying down the street, faultlessly gowned as to silks and sables, save that one dainty foot was shod with a high-heeled French slipper and the other was incased in a laborer’s brogan. They say that as she walked she careened like a bark-rigged ship before a typhoon.
An hour spent behind the counter of the food supply depot in the park tennis court yielded rich reward to the seeker after the outlandish. The tennis court was piled high with the plunder of several grocery stores and the cargoes of many relief cars. A square cut in the wire screen permitted of the insertion of a counter, behind which stood members of the militia acting as food dispensers. Before the improvised window passed the line of refugees, a line which stretched back fully 300 yards to Speedway track.
“I want a can of condensed cream, so I can feed my baby and my dog,” said a large, florid-faced woman in a gaudy kimono, “and I don’t care for crackers, but you can throw in some potted chicken if you have it.”
“What’s in that bottle over there?” queried the next applicant. “Tomato ketchup? Well, of all the luck! Say, young man, just give me three.”