The Call of the Cumberlands Part 23

She glanced inquiringly at Samson, who had not smiled, and who stood looking puzzled.

"A penny for your thoughts, Mr. South, from down South," she challenged.

"I guess I'm sort of like Mr. Graddy," said the boy, slowly. "I was just wondering how you do do it."

He spoke with perfect seriousness, and, after a moment, the girl broke into a prolonged peal of laughter.

"Oh, you are delicious!" she exclaimed. "If I could do the _ingenue_ like that, believe me, I'd make some hit." She came over, and, laying a hand on each of the boy's shoulders, kissed him lightly on the cheek. "That's for a droll boy!" she said. "That's the best line I've heard pulled lately."

Farbish was smiling in quiet amus.e.m.e.nt. He tapped the mountaineer on the shoulder.

"I've heard George Lescott speak of you," he said, genially. "I've rather a fancy for being among the discoverers of men of talent. We must see more of each other."

Samson left the party early, and with a sense of disgust. It was, at the time of his departure, waxing more furious in its merriment. It seemed to him that nowhere among these people was a note of sincerity, and his thoughts went back to the parting at the stile, and the girl whose artlessness and courage were honest.

Several days later, Samson was alone in Lescott's studio. It was nearing twilight, and he had laid aside a volume of De Maupa.s.sant, whose simple power had beguiled him. The door opened, and he saw the figure of a woman on the threshold. The boy rose somewhat shyly from his seat, and stood looking at her. She was as richly dressed as Miss Starr had been, but there was the same difference as between the colors of the sunset sky and the exaggerated daubs of Colla.s.so's landscape.

She stood lithely straight, and her furs fell back from a throat as smooth and slenderly rounded as Sally's. Her cheeks were bright with the soft glow of perfect health, and her lips parted over teeth that were as sound and strong as they were decorative. This girl did not have to speak to give the boy the conviction that she was some one whom he must like. She stood at the door a moment, and then came forward with her hand outstretched.

"This is Mr. South, isn't it?" she asked, with a frank friendliness in her voice.

"Yes, ma'am, that's my name."

"I'm Adrienne Lescott," said the girl. "I thought I'd find my brother here. I stopped by to drive him up-town."

Samson had hesitatingly taken the gloved hand, and its grasp was firm and strong despite its ridiculous smallness.

"I reckon he'll be back presently." The boy was in doubt as to the proper procedure. This was Lescott's studio, and he was not certain whether or not it lay in his province to invite Lescott's sister to take possession of it. Possibly, he ought to withdraw. His ideas of social usages were very vague.

"Then, I think I'll wait," announced the girl. She threw off her fur coat, and took a seat before the open grate. The chair was large, and swallowed her up.

Samson wanted to look at her, and was afraid that this would be impolite. He realized that he had seen no real ladies, except on the street, and now he had the opportunity. She was beautiful, and there was something about her willowy grace of att.i.tude that made the soft and clinging lines of her gown fall about her in charming drapery effects. Her small pumps and silk-stockinged ankles as she held them out toward the fire made him say to himself:

"I reckon she never went barefoot in her life."

"I'm glad of this chance to meet you, Mr. South," said the girl with a smile that found its way to the boy's heart. After all, there was sincerity in "foreign" women. "George talks of you so much that I feel as if I'd known you all the while. Don't you think I might claim friendship with George's friends?"

Samson had no answer. He wished to say something equally cordial, but the old instinct against effusiveness tied his tongue.

"I owe right smart to George Lescott," he told her, gravely.

"That's not answering my question," she laughed. "Do you consent to being friends with me?"

"Miss--" began the boy. Then, realizing that in New York this form of address is hardly complete, he hastened to add: "Miss Lescott, I've been here over nine months now, and I'm just beginning to realize what a rube I am. I haven't no--" Again, he broke off, and laughed at himself. "I mean, I haven't any idea of proper manners, and so I'm, as we would say down home, 'plumb skeered' of ladies."

As he accused himself, Samson was looking at her with unblinking directness; and she met his glance with eyes that twinkled.

"Mr. South," she said, "I know all about manners, and you know all about a hundred real things that I want to know. Suppose we begin teaching each other?"

Samson's face lighted with the revolutionizing effect that a smile can bring only to features customarily solemn.

"Miss Lescott," he said, "let's call that a trade--but you're gettin'

all the worst of it. To start with, you might give me a lesson right now in how a feller ought to act, when he's talkin' to a lady--how I ought to act with you!"

Her laugh made the situation as easy as an old shoe.

Ten minutes later, Lescott entered.

"Well," he said, with a smile, "shall I Introduce you people, or have you already done it for yourselves?"

"Oh," Adrienne a.s.sured him, "Mr. South and I are old friends." As she left the room, she turned and added: "The second lesson had better be at my house. If I telephone you some day when we can have the school-room to ourselves, will you come up?"

Samson grinned, and forgot to be bashful as he replied:

"I'll come a-kitin'!"

CHAPTER XVIII

Early that year, the touch of autumn came to the air. Often, returning at sundown from the afternoon life cla.s.s, Samson felt the lure of its melancholy sweetness, and paused on one of the Washington Square benches, with many vague things stirring in his mind. Some of these things were as subtly intangible as the lazy sweetness that melted the facades of the walls into the soft colors of a dream city. He found himself loving the Palisades of Jersey, seen through a powdery glow at evening, and the red-gold glare of the setting sun on high-swung gilt signs. He felt with a throb of his pulses that he was in the Bagdad of the new world, and that every skysc.r.a.per was a minaret from which the muezzin rang toward the Mecca of his Art. He felt with a stronger throb the surety of young, but quickening, abilities within himself. Partly, it was the charm of Indian summer, partly a sense of growing with the days, but, also, though he had not as yet realized that, it was the new friendship into which Adrienne had admitted him, and the new experience of frank _camaraderie_ with a woman not as a member of an inferior s.e.x, but as an equal companion of brain and soul. He had seen her often, and usually alone, because he shunned meetings with strangers.

Until his education had advanced further, he wished to avoid social embarra.s.sments. He knew that she liked him, and realized that it was because he was a new and virile type, and for that reason a diversion --a sort of human novelty. She liked him, too, because it was rare for a man to offer her friendship without making love, and she was certain he would not make love. He liked her for the same many reasons that every one else did--because she was herself. Of late, too, he had met a number of men at Lescott's clubs. He was modestly surprised to find that, though his att.i.tude on these occasions was always that of one sitting in the background, the men seemed to like him, and, when they said, "See you again," at parting, it was with the convincing manner of real friendliness. Sometimes, even now, his language was ungrammatical, but so, for the matter of that, was theirs.... The great writer smiled with his slow, humorous lighting of the eyes as he observed to Lescott:

"We are licking our cub into shape, George, and the best of it is that, when he learns to dance ragtime to the organ, he isn't going to stop being a bear. He's a grizzly!"

One wonderful afternoon in October, when the distances were mist-hung, and the skies very clear, Samson sat across the table from Adrienne Lescott at a road-house on the Sound. The sun had set through great cloud battalions ma.s.sed against the west, and the horizon was fading into darkness through a haze like ash of roses. She had picked him up on the Avenue, and taken him into her car for a short spin, but the afternoon had beguiled them, luring them on a little further, and still a little further. When they were a score of miles from Manhattan, the car had suddenly broken down. It would, the chauffeur told them, be the matter of an hour to effect repairs, so the girl, explaining to the boy that this event gave the affair the aspect of adventure, turned and led the way, on foot, to the nearest road-house.

"We will telephone that we shall be late, and then have dinner," she laughed. "And for me to have dinner with you alone, unchaperoned at a country inn, is by New York standards delightfully unconventional. It borders on wickedness." Then, since their att.i.tude toward each other was so friendly and innocent, they both laughed. They had dined under the trees of an old manor house, built a century ago, and now converted into an inn, and they had enjoyed themselves because it seemed to them pleasingly paradoxical that they should find in a place seemingly so shabby-genteel a _cuisine_ and service of such excellence. Neither of them had ever been there before, and neither of them knew that the reputation of this establishment was in its own way wide--and unsavory.

They had no way of knowing that, because of several thoroughly bruited scandals which had had origin here, it was a tabooed spot, except for persons who preferred a semi-shady retreat; and they pa.s.sed over without suspicion the palpable surprise of the head waiter when they elected to occupy a table on the terrace instead of a _cabinet particulier_.

But the repairs did not go as smoothly as the chauffeur had expected, and, when he had finished, he was hungry. So, eleven o'clock found them still chatting at their table on the lighted lawn. After awhile, they fell silent, and Adrienne noticed that her companion's face had become deeply, almost painfully set, and that his gaze was tensely focused on herself.

"What is it, Mr. South?" she demanded.

The young man began to speak, in a steady, self-accusing voice.

"I was sitting here, looking at you," he said, bluntly. "I was thinking how fine you are in every way; how there is as much difference in the texture of men and women as there is in the texture of their clothes. From that automobile cap you wear to your slippers and stockings, you are clad in silk. From your brain to the tone of your voice, you are woven of human silk. I've learned lately that silk isn't weak, but strong. They make the best balloons of it." He paused and laughed, but his face again became sober. "I was thinking, too, of your mother. She must be sixty, but she's a young woman. Her face is smooth and unwrinkled, and her heart is still in bloom. At that same age, George won't be much older than he is now."

The compliment was so obviously not intended as compliment at all that the girl flushed with pleasure.

"Then," went on Samson, his face slowly drawing with pain, "I was thinking of my own people. My mother was about forty when she died. She was an old woman. My father was forty-three. He was an old man. I was thinking how they withered under their drudgery--and of the monstrous injustice of it all."

Adrienne Lescott nodded. Her eyes were sweetly sympathetic.

"It's the hardship of the conditions," she said, softly. "Those conditions will change."

"But that's not all I was thinking," went on the boy.