“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.