The Call of the Cumberlands

Off across the lawns and woodlands stretched the blue, sail-flecked

waters of the Sound, and on the next hill rose the tile roofs and cream

-white walls of the country club.

One evening, Adrienne left the dancers for the pergola, where she took

refuge under a mass of honeysuckle.

Samson South followed her. She saw him coming, and smiled. She was

contrasting this Samson, loosely clad in flannels, with the Samson she

had first seen rising awkwardly to greet her in the studio.

"You should have stayed inside and made yourself agreeable to the

girls," Adrienne reproved him, as he came up. "What's the use of making

a lion of you, if you won't roar for the visitors?"

"I've been roaring," laughed the man. "I've just been explaining to

Miss Willoughby that we only eat the people we kill in Kentucky on

certain days of solemn observance and sacrifice. I wanted to be

agreeable to you, Drennie, for a while."

The girl shook her head sternly, but she smiled and made a place for

him at her side. She wondered what form his being agreeable to her

would take.

"I wonder if the man or woman lives," mused Samson, "to whom the

fragrance of honeysuckle doesn't bring back some old memory that is as

strong--and sweet--as itself."

The girl did not at once answer him. The breeze was stirring the hair

on her temples and neck. The moon was weaving a lace pattern on the

ground, and filtering its silver light through the vines. At last, she

asked: "Do you ever find yourself homesick, Samson, these days?"

The man answered with a short laugh. Then, his words came softly, and

not his own words, but those of one more eloquent: "'Who hath desired the Sea? Her excellent loneliness rather

"'Than the forecourts of kings, and her uttermost pits

than the streets where men gather....

"'His Sea that his being fulfills?

"'So and no otherwise--"so and no otherwise hillmen

desire their hills.'"

"And yet," she said, and a trace of the argumentative stole into her

voice, "you haven't gone back."

"No." There was a note of self-reproach in his voice. "But soon I

shall go. At least, for a time. I've been thinking a great deal lately

about 'my fluttered folk and wild.' I'm just beginning to understand my

relation to them, and my duty."

"Your duty is no more to go back there and throw away your life," she

found herself instantly contending, "than it is the duty of the young

eagle, who has learned to fly, to go back to the nest where he was

hatched."