IV

The artist walked the half-dozen blocks to Mr. Krehbeil's place the

next day. He found the old man in the basement shop of his fussy house,

hunched over his bench with a powerful light overhead. He was trying to

file a saw.

"Mr. Krehbeil!" Halvorsen called over the shriek of metal.

The carpenter turned around and peered with watery eyes. "I can't see

like I used to," he said querulously. "I go over the same teeth on this

damn saw, I skip teeth, I can't see the light shine off it when I got

one set. The glare." He banged down his three-cornered file petulantly.

"Well, what can I do for you?"

"I need some crating stock. Anything. I'll trade you a couple of my

maple four-by-fours."

The old face became cunning. "And will you set my saw? My _saws_, I

mean. It's nothing to you--an hour's work. You have the eyes."

Halvorsen said bitterly, "All right." The old man had to drive his

bargain, even though he might never use his saws again. And then the

artist promptly repented of his bitterness, offering up a quick prayer

that his own failure to conform didn't make him as much of a nuisance

to the world as Krehbeil was.

The carpenter was pleased as they went through his small stock of wood

and chose boards to crate the dolphin relief. He was pleased enough to

give Halvorsen coffee and cake before the artist buckled down to filing

the saws.

Over the kitchen table, Halvorsen tried to probe. "Things pretty slow

now?"

It would be hard to spoil Krehbeil's day now. "People are always fools.

They don't know good hand work. Some day," he said apocalyptically, "I

laugh on the other side of my face when their foolish machine-buildings

go falling down in a strong wind, all of them, all over the country.

Even my boy--I used to beat him good, almost every day--he works a

foolish concrete machine and his house should fall on his head like the

rest."

Halvorsen knew it was Krehbeil's son who supported him by mail, and

changed the subject. "You get some cabinet work?"

"Stupid women! What they call antiques--they don't know Meissen, they

don't know Biedermeier. They bring me trash to repair sometimes. I make

them pay; I swindle them good."

"I wonder if things would be different if there were anything left over

in Europe...."

"People will still be fools, Mr. Halvorsen," said the carpenter

positively. "Didn't you say you were going to file those saws today?"

So the artist spent two noisy hours filing before he carried his

crating stock to the studio.

* * * * *

Lucy was there. She had brought some things to eat. He dumped the

lumber with a bang and demanded: "Why aren't you at work?"

"We get days off," she said vaguely. "Austin thought he'd give me the

cash for the terra-cotta and I could give it to you."

She held out an envelope while he studied her silently. The farce was

beginning again. But this time he dreaded it.

It would not be the first time that a lonesome, discontented girl chose

to see him as a combination of romantic rebel and lost pup, with the

consequences you'd expect.

He knew from books, experience and Labuerre's conversation in the old

days that there was nothing novel about the comedy--that there had

even been artists, lots of them, who had counted on endless repetitions

of it for their livelihood.

The girl drops in with groceries and the artist is pleasantly

surprised; the girl admires this little thing or that after payday and

buys it and the artist is pleasantly surprised; the girl brings her

friends to take lessons or make little purchases and the artist is

pleasantly surprised. The girl may be seduced by the artist or vice

versa, which shortens the comedy, or they get married, which lengthens

it somewhat.

It had been three years since Halvorsen had last played out the farce

with a manic-depressive divorcee from Elmira: three years during which

he had crossed the mid-point between thirty and forty; three more years

to get beaten down by being unwanted and working too much and eating

too little.

Also, he knew, he was in love with this girl.

He took the envelope, counted three hundred and twenty dollars and

crammed it into his pocket. "That was your idea," he said. "Thanks. Now

get out, will you? I've got work to do."

She stood there, shocked.

"_I said get out. I have work to do._"

"Austin was right," she told him miserably. "You don't care how people

feel. You just want to get things out of them."

She ran from the studio, and Halvorsen fought with himself not to run

after her.

He walked slowly into his workshop and studied his array of tools,

though he paid little attention to his finished pieces. It would be

nice to spend about half of this money on open-hearth steel rod and

bar stock to forge into chisels; he thought he knew where he could get

some--but she would be back, or he would break and go to her and be

forgiven and the comedy would be played out, after all.

He couldn't let that happen.

V

Aalesund, on the Atlantic side of the Dourefeld mountains of Norway,

was in the lee of the blasted continent. One more archeologist there

made no difference, as long as he had the sense to recognize the

propellor-like international signposts that said with their three

blades, _Radiation Hazard_, and knew what every schoolboy knew about

protective clothing and reading a personal Geiger counter.

The car Halvorsen rented was for a brief trip over the mountains to

study contaminated Oslo. Well-muffled, he could make it and back in a

dozen hours and no harm done.

But he took the car past Oslo, Wennersborg and Goteborg, along the

Kattegat coast to Helsingborg, and abandoned it there, among the

three-bladed polyglot signs, crossing to Denmark. Danes were as unlike

Prussians as they could be, but their unfortunate little peninsula was

a sprout off Prussia which radio-cobalt dust couldn't tell from the

real thing. The three-bladed signs were most specific.

With a long way to walk along the rubble-littered highways, he stripped

off the impregnated coveralls and boots. He had long since shed the

noisy counter and the uncomfortable gloves and mask.

The silence was eerie as he limped into Copenhagen at noon. He didn't

know whether the radiation was getting to him or whether he was tired

and hungry and no more. As though thinking of a stranger, he liked what

he was doing.

_I'll be my own audience, he thought. God knows I learned there isn't

any other, not any more. You have to know when to stop. Rodin, the

dirty old, wonderful old man, knew that. He taught us not to slick it

and polish it and smooth it until it looked like liquid instead of

bronze and stone. Van Gogh was crazy as a loon, but he knew when to

stop and varnish it, and he didn't care if the paint looked like paint

instead of looking like sunset clouds or moonbeams. Up in Hartford,

Browne and Sharpe stop when they've got a turret lathe; they don't put

caryatids on it. I'll stop while my life is a life, before it becomes

a thing with distracting embellishments such as a wife who will come

to despise me, a succession of gradually less worthwhile pieces that

nobody will look at._

_Blame nobody_, he told himself, lightheadedly.

And then it was in front of him, terminating a vista of weeds and bomb

rubble--Milles' Orpheus Fountain.

It took a man, he thought. Esthetikon circuits couldn't do it. There

was a gross mixture of styles, a calculated flaw that the esthetikon

couldn't be set to make. Orpheus and the souls were classic or later;

the three-headed dog was archaic. That was to tell you about the

antiquity and invincibility of Hell, and that Cerberus knows Orpheus

will never go back into life with his bride.

There was the heroic, tragic central figure that looked mighty enough

to battle with the gods, but battle wasn't any good against the

grinning, knowing, hateful three-headed dog it stood on. You don't

battle the pavement where you walk or the floor of the house you're in;

you can't. So Orpheus, his face a mask of controlled and suffering

fury crashes a great chord from his lyre that moved trees and stones.

Around him the naked souls in Hell start at the chord, each in its own

way: the young lovers down in death; the mother down in death; the

musician, deaf and down in death, straining to hear.

Halvorsen, walking uncertainly toward the fountain, felt something

break inside him, and a heaviness in his lungs. As he pitched forward

among the weeds, he thought he heard the chord from the lyre and didn't

care that the three-headed dog was grinning its knowing, hateful grin

down at him.