Chapter 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.