she is alone so much, words get all tangled up for her and she
forgets how to use speech; but I’ve never noticed this, not yet, at
any rate.
“Uf!” says Madam Knoll when I go to see her. “I’ve had no one to
speak to all day and I’m perishing for talk; it is good to have you
come.”
To tell the truth, I go up there because there is so much to amuse
myself with. In the first place, Madam Knoll has a toy shop. Two
great wide tables are packed full of all kinds of toys. On the walls
hang jumping-jacks and red-cheeked dolls that shine and simper in the
sun; and from the ceiling hang small birdcages and brownies and every
such thing that can in any way be made to hang from a ceiling. I am
allowed to go about and play with anything and everything. I wind
up the music-boxes till our ears ring with opera melodies. I wind
the tops, too, and get a whole crowd of them spinning on the floor
at once. Oh, there is plenty of fun to be had up in Madam Knoll’s
attic room, I assure you. And Madam Knoll sits on the little platform
beside the window, singing in a quavering voice and sewing on shirts,
for she sells them as well as toys.
However, few customers climb the steep stairs up to Madam Knoll’s
room. Many days can pass when I am the only customer, and of course,
I never buy anything.
Madam Knoll had married a Danish glazier, but the name, Knoll, had
always been a thorn in the flesh to her, so, all of her own accord,
she began to call herself Madam Hansen, for she thought Hansen an
extremely pretty name. On one side of the tailor’s front door there
is a green sign with white letters which says:
“SHIRTS MADE AT ANY TIME BY MADAM
HANSEN”
and on the other side of the entrance:
“NEWEST TOYS FOR SALE. MADAM
HANSEN”
People read the signs, then go in and ask for Madam Knoll.
It is not true that the newest toys are to be bought at her shop,
though; for, between you and me, she never buys any new ones.
“I should be pretty stupid if I bought new things before I had sold
out the old ones,” says Madam Knoll. But it is stupid of her not to,
I think.
Well, besides the toys there is the big tortoise. That was brought
home by a sailor many years ago, and has now crept and crawled over
Madam Knoll’s floor for at least ten years. It is slow and clumsy
about turning around, but it has lively little black eyes. Sometimes
when I sit and look at the tortoise I think how dreadful for it just
to crawl about in the half-darkness between the chair legs when it
had been used to glorious sunshine and soft warm white sand and
sea-water thoroughly warmed by the sun, down on the coast of Guinea
where it came from.
But Madam Knoll does not like me to say that the tortoise does not
enjoy itself with her.
“I should be thankful, if I were a tortoise, to walk about in
quietness on a clean, scoured floor, instead of being swallowed by
a shark or roasted by the sun,” says Madam Knoll. But I am not sure
that the tortoise would have the same opinion as she about its home.
However, Madam Knoll takes great pleasure in the tortoise. “Its eyes
are so much like my man Knoll’s eyes,” she says.
Lindquist, the tailor, owns the house and lives on the first floor.
He has one son, Kalle, an idle good-for-nothing boy who has a great
habit of sitting on the stairs leading to Madam Knoll’s room; and
on that account, she and Kalle live in continual warfare. She says
that he keeps customers away, because he is always sitting on her
stairs. Time after time she limps to the hallway and peers down to
see whether he is there. She keeps an old broom in the corner just to
have something at hand to thump Kalle’s head with if he won’t go off
her stairs.
“Now be a good boy, Kalle,” says Madam Knoll, holding the broom
behind her, “and go away when I tell you to.”
“No,” says Kalle from the stairs.
“Are you defying me, you impudent lazybones? Go away—and that
quickly.” A warning thump with the broom on Kalle’s head. “Do you
think it is any help to me to have you sit there?” Thump, thump. “Do
you think folk will take the trouble to jam themselves against the
wall past you when they want to come up to do some business with an
old friend?” A heavy thump on Kalle’s red head.
“No,” says Kalle, not stirring.
“Well, then, I shall knock on the floor for your father.” Since
Madam Knoll has had the rheumatism, it hurts her to go up and down
stairs, so she calls Lindquist that way. He knows well what it means,
darts out to the stairs and hauls Kalle by force into his room. This
happens quite often, but really not many more customers come to Madam
Knoll when Kalle isn’t sitting on the stairs than when he is.
Madam Knoll has lived in the tailor’s attic for seventeen years. She
has thought of giving up her lodging every day in all these years,
she says; but there is one thing that keeps her from moving, and that
is that nowhere in the whole town could she find such a good warm
floor for her own feet and for the tortoise’s, because Lindquist
keeps a good fire both summer and winter to heat his irons for
pressing.
One day, to my great astonishment, I met Madam Knoll and Policeman
Weiby away up in Grand Street. Madam Knoll, you see, almost never
goes down-stairs, even. Her face was as red as a boiled lobster and
she talked incessantly as she limped along. Policeman Weiby’s under
lip stuck out, and he toddled beside her with short mincing steps,
for he’s an old man. Naturally, I joined them at once.
“They have stolen my tortoise,” said Madam Knoll. “Oh, that
beautiful, poor, dear creature!”
“Who stole it?” I asked.
“Well, if I knew that,” said Madam Knoll angrily, “I shouldn’t have
needed to get a policeman. Haven’t I walked with my bad legs all the
way over here after Weiby?”
When we arrived at the house Weiby searched the whole attic, poked
his cane under the bed and the commode and shook the mat the
tortoise usually lay on.
“I’ve done all that myself,” said Madam Knoll angrier than ever.
“Yes, the turtle is gone,” said Weiby.
“Turtle!” said Madam Knoll, so indignant that she could scarcely get
the word out.
“We must advertise it,” said Weiby.
“Advertise? Much good that would do!” sniffed Madam Knoll.
“What did you call the police for, Madam Knoll, if you won’t do what
he says?” Weiby was angry, too, now.
“Call me Madam Hansen, as my name is,” said Madam Knoll. “However,
you may as well go. I can see that you would never find the tortoise
if you stumbled over it.” And now she and the policeman were
decidedly at loggerheads.
The end was that Weiby stamped down the stairs promising that it
would be a long time before he would come there again.
“What is such a man good for?” said Madam Knoll. “Shake the mat and
look under the bed as if he had thought of something brand-new, when
he might know that I had done all that; he’d never find my tortoise,
not if he walked on his head all over town, I could see that by his
whole make-up. Oh, the poor lost tortoise! Do you think that whoever
has taken it knows that it has four raisins every day,—uh, hu,
hu!—and a carrot? Well, I’ll say this,” concluded Madam Knoll, drying
her eyes; “if you find the tortoise, you shall have the music-box
that plays, ‘Bim bam! Bilibum, bum, bum,’ and my thanks besides.”
Oh-h! Wonder of wonders! That charming music-box for my own!
And so began the time when I hunted for the tortoise. It was really
great fun, you know,—exactly as if I were a detective; though people
said I would never make a detective, for I was too indiscreet and
talked too much.
My! The places I went to, to inquire about that tortoise! Into yards
and barns and sheds of all sorts, down in the town, and up on the
hill; and I talked with every man, woman and child about the lost
tortoise. But no. No one had seen anything a bit like such a creature.
“Well?” Madam Knoll would say questioningly, looking over her
spectacles, the minute I opened the door. “Have you found any trace
of my dear, beautiful tortoise?”
It began to look as if there were little hope of my getting the
music-box that played, “Bim bam! Bilibum, bum, bum.”
Eight days had passed since the tortoise had disappeared. Shame on
me, I scarcely thought of it any more; but a person can’t go on
thinking of one thing forever.
One day, though, when I went home from school, past the cemetery,
I suddenly wanted awfully to play hop-scotch on Peter Bertzen’s
gravestone, it is so remarkably flat and broad, just the thing for
hop-scotch. While I was hopping there, something moved among the
barberry-bushes over by the stone wall. When I went to find out what
it was, I saw Kalle Lindquist squatting on the ground, handling
something. I crept softly up to him—and just think! It was the
tortoise! It had been lying in the stone wall, I could see, for Kalle
had taken out some stones from there.
[Illustration: “KALLE, YOU RASCAL!” I SAID, GRABBING HIM BY THE HAIR.
_Page 157._]
“Kalle, you rascal!” I said, grabbing him by the hair.
“Let me go! Let me go!” screamed Kalle. But I had no idea of doing
that until I had got the tortoise from him.
The tortoise was dead; I saw that instantly. The little black eyes
usually so lively were half-shut and dim.
“Oh, you cruel Kalle!” I said. “You put the poor thing in the stone
wall and let it starve to death. You’d better look out for Madam
Knoll. You’ll catch it from her!”
Kalle only laughed and dug in the dirt with a stick.
I took the tortoise in my apron and ran full gallop to Madam Knoll’s.
I forgot my schoolbooks altogether and left them in their strap on
Peter Bertzen’s gravestone.
“Well?” said Madam Knoll as usual, looking over her spectacles as
soon as I appeared at the door.
I was so out of breath that I couldn’t speak; I just showed her what
I had in my apron.
Madam Knoll struck her hands together, but when she saw that the
tortoise was dead, she began to cry.
“It was Kalle who took it,” said I.
“Kalle!” shouted Madam Knoll. “Give me the broom!” she shouted even
louder.
When she got the broom, she pounded on the floor and called
“Lindquist!” so that people heard her far up the street. Lindquist
came hastily up, his tailor’s sewing-ring on his finger and holding a
needle with a long thread trailing from it. He must have thought that
the house was on fire, he looked so frightened.
“See here!” said Madam Knoll in a quivering voice. “See here what
your bad boy has done.” She laid the tortoise on its back and
presented it to him in that manner, so that Lindquist should see at
once how dead it was.
“What—what does this mean?” asked Lindquist, bewildered.
“Mean?” cried Madam Knoll. “It means that I shall move from here
to-morrow, Lindquist, understand that. It means that your son has
killed my tortoise.”
Madam Knoll talked louder and louder as she threatened Lindquist with
both the police and the Parliament. Lindquist was utterly unable to
make himself heard when he tried to speak, for Madam Knoll entirely
out-talked him. My, but there was a hullabaloo in her attic that day!
But Madam Knoll did not move from his house as she had threatened to,
after all, for she lives there even now.
Although the tortoise was dead when I found it, I got the music-box,
nevertheless. It stands beside my bed. In the mornings everything
has to go in such a tearing hurry that I have no time to think of
music-boxes; but every night when I undress, I wind it up and then
fall asleep while it plays, oh, so delicately and prettily, “Bim,
bam! Bilibum, bum, bum!”
XII
PLAY ACTING
Oh, I am so angry with Otto, the woodcutter! for it was all his
fault. Just because he was cross over Father’s having bought so much
green wood, he had to——Well, I’m going to tell you all about it.
A better theater than our woodshed is not to be found in the whole
town. Emil Rasmussen’s hall, where all the traveling actors play,
can’t come up to our woodshed, that is certain. Of course I mean in
the summer when there isn’t any wood there.
The little platform over in the corner, where the heavy old
baby-carriage stands and old boxes and all the other rubbish,
is the most magnificent stage any one could wish; and the long,
narrow woodshed is a fine place for the spectators. There is also a
dressing-room for the actors in the old carriage-house. True, you
have to creep through a hole rather high up in the wall to get in
there from the woodshed, but that is a small matter. What is worse
is that a box of red ochre stands right under the hole and there’s
always danger of falling into it. Except for that the carriage-house
is a capital dressing-room.
There are no windows in the woodshed. When we shut the door, the only
light is what comes through cracks and holes and sifts down between
the tiles in the roof; but there are so many cracks and openings that
there is more than enough light, anyway.
All the year round, Otto, the woodcutter, stands in the woodshed with
sawdust in his hair and chops and saws with his rough purplish hands.
I often sit on a chopping-block near him and tell him fairy tales
that I invent myself. Little reward do I get for my trouble, for Otto
says never a word about my stories, though I make them as exciting as
ever I can.
Well, once we girls decided that we would act a play.
“Warburg’s Company” had just been in town and played “Cousin Lottie”
and “Adventures on a Walking Tour.” We had had free tickets every
evening and I had sat in the front row and been in the seventh heaven
of ecstasy.
Oh, you should have seen Warburg! Such eyes! Such a beautiful nose!
And he spoke so charmingly! All the girls in our class went to the
wharf to see him off when he left town, and Karen Jensen cried
because she would not see him any more. She will not own up now that
she cried, but I distinctly saw tears shining in her eyes.
It was when we went home from the wharf that time, that we decided
we would act a play. There were Massa, Mina, Karen, Lolla, and I. We
should need Karsten, but not any of the other boys,—they are all so
disgusting nowadays. They whistle through keys and laugh and whisper
when we go past them, and I call such behavior disgusting.
But we must have Karsten, because he sings so charmingly. His voice
is so clear, so clear! When he sings:
“_Ja, vi elsker dette landet_,”[4]
it always makes the shivers go down my back; and old Miss Weyergang
says that is a sign of the “highest artistic enjoyment” any one can
have. Miss Weyergang was in Berlin once and heard “Lucca” sing, and
she felt as if one pail of cold water after another were emptied over
her; and nothing could have been more delightful, Miss Weyergang says.
So we must have Karsten. I can’t sing a bit. When I try to take a
high note, there comes out the queerest sound. It is like the noise
Karsten makes when I have shut him in the big empty meal-chest, and
he screeches so frightfully from inside there.
But if you imagine Karsten is willing to help us with our
performance, you make a great mistake.
“Do you think I will come and play with you girls? Be the only boy?
No, thank you. Perhaps you can get such a girl-boy as Peter, the
dean’s son, to do that, but not me. Very likely you’d dress me up as
you used to when I was little. Humph! No, indeed. I’m a chap who has
outgrown all that sort of thing.”
Well, this was going to cost us dear. To try to force Karsten would
be of no use. We must coax him.
“If you will be in our theatricals, Karsten, I’ll rip off the two
big buttons from the back of my winter coat and give them to you;
crocheted buttons, you know.”
“We-ell, you’ll have to give me the two that are on the front of the
coat, too.”
“Yes, yes; but then you must sing four times,—once for each button.”
Karsten grumbled a little at this, but Massa promised him a
cornucopia full of plums from their shop, and so he gave in.
At school the next day, off in a corner of the class-room, we wrote
the program. All the other girls crowded about us, wishing to know
what the secret was. Massa and I stood in front and pushed them
away, while behind us Mina and Karen wrote as fast as they could on
the program. Such an excitement!
The principal came to the door, displeased at the noise; and Anna
Brynildsen went and tattled, saying that I had pulled Kima Pirk’s
hair. Well, it was true that I had clutched Kima by that red-brown
hair of hers, but it was purely in self-defense, for Kima is much
stronger than I.
At last the program was all written out. Here it is:
FIRST APPEARANCE OF THE GIOJA COMPANY
IN THE JUDGE’S WOODSHED
_Saturday, the 12th_
1. _Ja, vi elsker_ Sung by Young Gioja
(That was Karsten.)
2. Declamation Miss Ella Gioja
(That was I.)
3. The Play, “Cousin Lottie.” Freely rendered
from memory. By the whole
Gioja Company.
4. “The Wild Duck Swims in Silence,” Young Gioja
5. Perhaps two extra numbers.
Entrance fee: What you please, but not less than one _öre_ for each
person.
It was certainly a magnificent program and a great deal for the
money. In the next recess we put the program up on the wall so that
every one could see it. They all said they would come.
Right after dinner on Saturday Mina and I cleared up the woodshed.
You may well believe we worked hard. Chopping-blocks, boards,
shavings, axes, and saws,—away into the corners with them all. We
swept and swept and arranged and rearranged; but we made it look
awfully nice, you may depend upon that.
We wouldn’t try to have scenery or “wings.” To fix up such theater
contrivances is tremendously troublesome. No, we could creep in and
out of the hole in the wall; that was much more convenient.
When it came to the point, Karsten was determined that he would not
dress in costume, and of course he must, or it wouldn’t be like a
real theater.
More coaxing of Karsten, a promise of another button from my winter
coat, and a very rare Rio Janeiro stamp,—and at last he yielded. We
took off his jacket, put a red scarf over one shoulder, slanting down
to his waist, and set an old peaked felt hat on his head. His face
was awfully red and angry,—he hated the whole thing, you see,—but he
couldn’t resist that rare Rio Janeiro stamp.
Now the spectators began to come. We peeped through the hole to see
them, and my goodness! how quickly the woodshed was filled! Pshaw!
There were the boys, Nils and Anton and Ezekiel and all. Ugh! Massa
stood at the door and took the money and I saw her shove some boys
out who were trying to get in without paying.
It was five o’clock, the time for the performance to begin.
I rang a little cow-bell and Karsten crept through the hole in the
wall in full costume. I followed him with an accordion for I was to
play an accompaniment, you see. I can’t play the accordion very well
but I hoped I might get along all right, nevertheless.
“_Ja, vi elsker_,” began Karsten, and I accompanied him as well as
I could but he sang faster than I played, so I kept several notes
behind him.
“You’re playing wrong,” said Karsten, stopping short in the song.
“I’m not, either. We’ll soon get together. You just keep on singing.”
We went at it again.
“If you can’t play properly I won’t sing any more,” said Karsten
after a few more notes.
“Oh, you horrid thing! Keep on singing. I’ll catch up.”
But Karsten sprang at me and thumped me over the head two or three
times. I grabbed him by both ears but he wrenched himself away.
There was a roar of laughter throughout the whole woodshed, and the
boys shouted, “Bravo! Bravo!”
O pshaw!
Karsten had already clambered back through the hole. I saw only his
legs when I turned around. Under the circumstances, there was nothing
for me to do but to creep after him.
In the woodshed, the spectators whistled through their fingers,
shouted and screeched. After draping a black shawl over my head I
again made my entrée in as dignified a manner as was possible through
the hole.
Until the very moment I stepped forward on the stage, I was in
the most horrible uncertainty as to what I should recite. It was
impossible for me to decide whether it should be “_Terje Vigen_,” or
“The Church Clock in Farum,” or “Little squirrel sat,” or what. The
room was now still as death.
“Ahem! h’m!” I kept clearing my throat.
O dear me! Which poem _should_ I choose?
But of all things in the world! There, at the woodshed door, stood
Otto, the woodcutter, looking frightfully cross.
“What’s all this?” he called in a rough, angry voice.
I saw danger ahead, and spoke from the stage as mildly and soothingly
as I could.
“This is a theater, Otto. We’re acting—having awfully good fun.”
Almost before I had finished speaking, the spectators shouted in
chorus:
“Theater, Otto! Theater!” and rushed at him, snatching at his jacket
from behind, while Nils set up a blood-curdling Indian howl, such as
only he can give; and everything was in a hullabaloo in no time.
Suddenly I saw Otto stride over to a heap of wood in the corner and
grab a stick.
“Such trash! Such foolishness!” he shouted, swinging the stick in the
air. “There must be a stop put to this, I tell you! Such goings on in
a regular woodshed! Out with you!” He was like a furious savage.
“Look out! He harms people when he is so angry,” shouted Karsten from
the hole.
All the spectators ran for the door, tumbling and scrambling over
each other. I retired as hastily as possible through the hole,
and darted out of the carriage-house door; and up the hill sprang
spectators and actors in a wild rush.
All the rest of the day Otto went rummaging and ransacking around in
the woodshed and scolding over wicked children, the foolishness of
the world, and the misery of having green wood to cut up.
He was in a bad humor over the affair the whole summer, and will
surely never forget it.
The next day at school, all the spectators came to us and wanted
their money back. I thought that was mean, but, anyway, they didn’t
get it; for of course we had immediately spent it on lemon-drops.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] National Song of Norway. (“Yes, we love this land.”)
XIII
A DAY AT SCHOOL
Sometimes it is rather pleasant to go to school; a little tedious, oh
yes, but often jolly good fun.
What makes it horrid is that one has to go to school in all kinds of
weather. When there is sunshine and such fresh, crisp, clear air that
it tingles through your whole body even to your finger-tips, and you
have to go to school and sit there three, four, five hours, then I
really think it is disgusting. Yes, I allow myself to say that then
it truly is disgusting.
But when there is a drizzling rain and I know my lessons, it is not
so bad to go to school, after all. I almost always know my lessons,
for that matter. When I study them twice over and then shut my eyes
and hear myself, I know them. When there is something very difficult
in our “History of the World,” such as the French Revolution, the
Legislative Assembly, the Representative Assembly, and all that,
why, then I have to study the lesson over three times.
I am at the head of the class, and always have been, as far back as I
can remember. So the other girls plague me to translate for them till
I am often bored. I scarcely get inside the class-room door in the
mornings before they rush at me, each with her book in her hand, and
draw me to a window or a corner to translate the German lesson or the
English lesson for them.
There is only one girl that I am afraid might get above me in the
class and take my place away from me. That is Anna Brynildsen. From
the moment she came into the school, and being a new pupil was put at
the foot of the class, I have been afraid of her, because people said
she was frightfully clever. She has already crept up so that her seat
is the second from the head.
There is something awfully exasperating to me about Anna Brynildsen.
I don’t like her looks, I don’t like her clothes or anything.
Antoinette Wium says I’d like her better if she weren’t so clever.
Well, I _don’t_ like the glib way she recites, as if everything were
as easy as A B C; and that self-satisfied look she wears is enough to
exasperate any one, I think. She almost never talks but when she does
say anything, every word is so sensible that she might as well be
eighty years old.
Ugh! that Anna Brynildsen!
Now I will tell you how a day at school goes with us. One only time
in all my life have I cheated at school, and it is that particular
day I am going to tell about.
I must begin at the beginning, and that is old Ingeborg who cleans
the schoolroom, wipes up the dust, puts wood in the stove, and so on.
But old Ingeborg is so old that she can’t see the dust, and when we
come to school it is lying thick everywhere. That is why I began to
do the dusting.
In the first hour, we always have a student from a Normal School, Mr.
Bu, as teacher. Did you ever hear such a name? But he is not half
bad, Mr. Bu; he is exceedingly kind. You see, very often I don’t get
the dusting and arranging done in time, but he doesn’t say anything
if I, once in a while, keep on dusting after the lesson begins.