On the following Monday Anne found a position with a fruit commission
house on Front Street. The salary was not quite what she had hoped, but
the surroundings were so different from the office of Lowell & Morrison
that she was glad to take it.
Here there were no soft rugs, no quietly closing doors, or smoothly
running elevators; no suave and courtly men. Great drays rumbled
through the street outside; loud-voiced men called orders in strange,
foreign tongues. For the first hours of the morning the warehouse shook
with the thud of huge crates being thrown from trucks, trundled through
the cool darkness of the shed and piled high to the shadow of the roof.
In the afternoon the rumble of the drays loading and unloading ceased;
many of the men went home; the place was quiet. Anne could hear the
whistle of the boats at the wharves, and on foggy days the wail of the
fog sirens very near.
On Saturday afternoon the office closed at one o'clock and Anne spent
until six looking for an apartment. At dusk she found what she thought
would do. It was the upper floor of an old house on the edge of Russian
Hill. The house was run down and rather dismal, but the rear windows
looked out on a small garden, and from Anne's floor, a little triangle
of the Bay was visible.
The landlady was a childless widow, a thin, saddened woman with soft
brown eyes that had almost lost the trick of brightening. But when
she heard about Rogie they lit gently and she suggested a sand-pile
in one corner of the garden and a crib for his morning and afternoon
nap in her own bedroom. Anne's first feeling, that there it would be
almost impossible to forget the past, lessened, and she closed the
arrangement, grateful for the garden, the glimpse of the Bay, and Mrs.
Jeffries' pleasure in Rogie.
On Sunday there was a family dinner at the flat and afterwards Anne
and Rogie and Belle came to the new home. Mrs. Jeffries had put some
flowers on the ugly center table and covered the gas globe with orange
crêpe paper.
"Oh," Anne gasped when she saw it, "I wish she hadn't done that."
"Never mind. Let it stay up for a day or two and then it can catch fire
or destroy itself somehow," Belle advised.