d up. The wild Irish playwright had terrible spells of depression.
Shelley, who wrote vaudeville turns in the concrete cell, was a chronic
pessimist. St. John, a young magazine writer, was an anarchic disciple
of Nietzsche. Masson, a painter, held to a doctrine of eternal
recurrence that was petrifying. And Hall, usually so merry, could
outfoot them all when he once got started on the cosmic pathos of
religion and the gibbering anthropomorphisms of those who loved not to
die. At such times Saxon was oppressed by these sad children of art. It
was inconceivable that they, of all people, should be so forlorn.

One night Hall turned suddenly upon Billy, who had been following dimly
and who only comprehended that to them everything in life was rotten and
wrong.

"Here, you pagan, you, you stolid and flesh-fettered ox, you monstrosity
of over-weening and perennial health and joy, what do you think of it?"
Hall demanded.

"Oh, I've had my troubles," Billy answered, speaking in his wonted slow
way. "I've had my hard times, an' fought a losin' strike, an' soaked my
watch, an' ben unable to pay my rent or buy grub, an' slugged scabs, an'
ben slugged, and ben thrown into jail for makin' a fool of myself. If
I get you, I'd be a whole lot better to be a swell hog fattenin' for
market an' nothin' worryin', than to be a guy sick to his stomach from
not savvyin' how the world is made or from wonderin' what's the good of
anything."

"That's good, that prize hog," the poet laughed. "Least irritation,
least effort--a compromise of Nirvana and life. Least irritation, least
effort, the ideal existence: a jellyfish floating in a tideless, tepid,
twilight sea."

"But you're missin' all the good things," Billy objected.

"Name them," came the challenge.

Billy was silent a moment. To him life seemed a large and generous
thing. He felt as if his arms ached from inability to compass it all,
and he began, haltingly at first, to put his feeling into speech.

"If you'd ever stood up in the ring an' out-gamed an' out-fought a man
as good as yourself for twenty rounds, you'd get what I'm drivin' at.
Jim Hazard an' I get it when we swim out through the surf an' laugh in
the teeth of the biggest breakers that ever pounded the beach, an'
when we come out from the shower, rubbed down and dressed, our skin an'
muscles like silk, our bodies an' brains all a-tinglin' like silk.. .."

He paused and gave up from sheer inability to express ideas that