For two years, the Worths collected these certificates, buying more stock in the mine than they could afford, and living as they were accustomed, on credit and debt. This borrowed way of life did nothing to curtail their habits; if anything, they lived more extravagantly on the promise of the profits from their gamble. With the war’s end in the spring, prices continued to rise, but despite the cost, daughter Jessie was sent to Europe with a governess on a summer’s tour. Eben found a girl and asked her to marry him, and brother Jams gave him a send-off never seen before in the city, a ball with full orchestra, a meal with pheasants shipped overland by train, and flowers of every kind, all out of pocket, and damn the expense. They made a wedding gift of a full silver service, as much a token of filial bonds as to encourage the purchase and use of silver among their acquaintances. Why, they even gave away money they did not have, to various benevolent societies for the care of homeless children, for it was important to the acquisition of a place in society to behave as if the millions existed, whether or no merely on paper.
Reckoning arrived swiftly, as bad news often does. They say people no longer had any confidence, though she could not understand how ordinary people could be confident one day and not the next. The lack of confidence brought a panic, and the panic caused the fall, and the value of the stock in the mining company plunged down the shaft, and there was no hope for recovery. Overnight, the Worths became worthless. The bubble had burst and not so much as a slick of soap remained. By the time they sold their shares for pennies and accounted for their considerable debts, little was left but the octagon house and its contents and some cash Flo had in her name to pay the domestic staff their monthly wages. The servants, a-course, were let go at once, and telegrams sent to hurry Jessie back from Italy. They was ruined, and so was Ebenezer, returning home from his wedding trip to less than nothing, who had to move instead with his new bride into the third floor of the octagon house. She—the girl’s name was Rebecca—was there all alone that Sunday in October when the Big One hit, the heaviest earth shocks ever felt in San Francisco to that time.
The Worths, sans Jams, was at service on Sunday morning, and when the first shock hit, the minister said stay calm, stay put, which they did for perhaps five seconds as the pews rocked violently and the stained-glass windows rattled like a carriage going over cobblestone. The second shock threw them from their seats, the whole church emptying into the streets, with the minister leading the flock to safety, the shepherd jogging past each and every sheep. A loud grinding noise followed, the brick buildings rubbing together, glass and plaster falling, and the earth itself rumbling and growling. The walls swayed and buckled like treetops in a tempest, and the windows popped out like firecrackers. Above, the bell kept ringing of its own accord even as the shock subsided, until the third tumbler tossed all around for another six seconds, and then it was all over.
Flo and her children watched in dull amazement as the cross on the steeple tottered to the left and stopped short of toppling over. A few blocks away, Jams and Eben crawled out of one of the hells with the gamblers and rummys and the hookers and that morning’s entertainment all blinking in the bright sunshine and swirling dust like bats from a cave. At the corner of Seventh and Howard, the earth had opened and laid bare a sewer flowing with water. Over where an empty lot had stood was now a pond, and they watched in a stupor of cards and liquor as a duck circled and landed there, calling in grave distress. Geysers were forced up into the air on certain street corners, and here and there among the ruined and cracked buildings small fires blazed. Back at the octagon house, poor Rebecca had been having a bath and had to run out into the street in nothing but a robe as the walls began swaying and making to bear down upon her. She was not the only one thrust out into the public. Others emerged in little more than a bedsheet, and it went to show what occupied the common man on a Sunday morn.
That was the beginning of the end for Rebecca and Eben, for she wanted no more part of the quakes and shakes of San Francisco, and he would not be parted from his brother. Last anyone saw her, she had taken the train back to her folks in Baltimore. As for the octagon house itself, the inner walls were badly damaged, the windows shattered, and every room littered with plaster from the ceiling. On all eight sides, paintings had fallen to the floor or swung round to face the walls, and every good piece of glass or china on the mantels and in the cupboards was chipped or broken. A small fissure, the size of a man’s arm, opened in the northwestern corner beneath the roof, letting in the air and dust, but the house survived, unlike so many others. The structure stood firm and strong, though some small damage had been done.