[3] An öre is less than three-tenths of a cent.
VIII
MADAM IGLAND’S GARDEN
Madam Igland has an enormous garden with a high board fence around it. To call it a beautiful garden would be a sin and a shame. The whole place is filled with beds of carrots, parsley, cabbages, onions and such things; while at one end there is a row of currant-bushes and an old tumble-down summer-house that stands with one side on the street. Madam Igland is a market-gardener, you see, and sells vegetables to the townsfolk. However, I say wrong when I say she is a gardener, for she can’t even walk, but sits all day long in a wheel-chair by the window. She has a “spy-mirror” there which reflects a part of the street she could not see otherwise.
No, it is not Madam Igland, it is Oline, who is really the gardener and the ruler over the garden. Oline is an old servant, awfully old and with only one tooth in her mouth; but that one is frightfully long and white.
I used to think that if I were in Oline’s place, I should have that tooth pulled out, for I thought that, being so very long, it must be in the way. Once I asked Oline why she didn’t do that.
“No, indeed, I sha’n’t do that,” said Oline. “For if I hadn’t that tooth, I couldn’t nourish myself.” Since that time I have looked at it with more respect, considering it is all that keeps Oline alive.
Oline is frightfully deaf, yet it is she who sells the garden stuff to people. All the money she gets for parsley, onions, or anything, she puts in an enormous pocket which she wears under the front of her apron.
Ola Silnes helps her in the garden. He always wears filthy white canvas trousers and jacket, has a very red face, and when he talks, grunts out something you can hardly understand from deep down in his throat.
All through the long summer day, Oline with her bare, brown weather-beaten legs is in the carrot-bed weeding. If you want five cents’ worth of onion tops, or anything, you have to go right up to her and take hold of her, for she doesn’t hear a thing. But I can tell you it isn’t advisable to steal into the garden when you don’t want to buy anything, for that makes her fly into a rage.
The board fence isn’t altogether tight at the back of the garden. There are little cracks between the boards, just big enough to stick your nose through and look in with one eye at a time; but through the cracks you can see lots of big, delicious-looking currants. O dear! There’s no pleasure in standing and looking through a crack at big, juicy, red currants when you can’t get any of them.