The Call of the Cumberlands

Adrienne Lescott was in Europe. Soon, she would return, and Horton

meant to show that he had not buried his talent.

* * * * * For eight months Samson's life had run in the steady ascent of gradual

climbing, but, in the four months from the first of August to the first

of December, the pace of his existence suddenly quickened. He left off

drawing from plaster casts, and went into a life class. His shyness

secretly haunted him. The nudity of the woman posing on the model

throne, the sense of his own almost as naked ignorance, and the dread

of the criticism to come, were all keen embarrassments upon him.

In this period, Samson had his first acquaintanceship with women,

except those he had known from childhood--and his first

acquaintanceship with the men who were not of his own art world. Of the

women, he saw several sorts. There were the aproned and frowsy

students, of uncertain age, who seemed to have no life except that

which existed under studio skylights. There were, also, a few younger

girls, who took their art life with less painful solemnity; and, of

course, the models in the "partially draped" and the "altogether."

Tony Collasso was an Italian illustrator, who lodged and painted in

studio-apartments in Washington Square, South. He had studied in the

Julian School and the Beaux Arts, and wore a shock of dark curls, a

Satanic black mustache, and an expression of Byronic melancholy. The

melancholy, he explained to Samson, sprang from the necessity of

commercializing his divine gift. His companions were various, numbering

among them a group of those pygmy celebrities of whom one has never

heard until by chance he meets them, and of whom their intimates speak

as of immortals.

To Collasso's studio, Samson was called one night by telephone. He had

sometimes gone there before to sit for an hour, chiefly as a listener,

while the man from Sorrento bewailed fate with his coterie, and

denounced all forms of government, over insipid Chianti. Sometimes, an

equally melancholy friend in soiled linen and frayed clothes took up

his violin, and, as he improvised, the noisy group would fall silent.

At such moments, Samson would ride out on the waves of melody, and see

again the velvet softness of the mountain night, with stars hanging

intimately close, and hear the ripple of Misery and a voice for which

he longed.

But, to-night, he entered the door to find himself in the midst of a

gay and boisterous party. The room was already thickly fogged with

smoke, and a dozen men and women, singing snatches of current airs,

were interesting themselves over a chafing dish. The studio of Tony

Collasso was of fair size, and adorned with many unframed paintings,

chiefly his own, and a few good tapestries and bits of bric-à-brac

variously jettisoned from the sea of life in which he had drifted. The

crowd itself was typical. A few very minor writers and artists, a model

or two, and several women who had thinking parts in current Broadway

productions.