Book one

Chapter 1

On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera^[1] stands a large, rose-colored hotel. Palms cool its façade, and before it stretches a short beach. Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people.

The hotel and its beach were one. Before eight a man came down to the beach in a blue bathrobe and swam a minute in the sea. When he had gone, beach and bay were quiet for an hour. In another hour the horns of motors began to blow down from the winding road along the low hills, which separate the shore from true Provençal France^[2].

A mile from the sea is a railroad stop, where one June morning in 1925 a train brought a woman and her daughter down to Gausse’s Hotel^[3]. The mother’s face was rather pretty; her expression was quiet in a pleasant way. However, one’s eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her cheeks lit to a lovely flame. Her fine forehead went gently up to where her hair burst into lovelocks and waves of ash blonde and gold. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, and shining. She was almost eighteen, her body was nearly complete, but the dew was still on her^[4].

As sea and sky appeared below them in a thin line the mother said:

“Something tells me we’re not going to like this place.”

“I want to go home anyhow,” the girl answered.

They both spoke cheerfully but were obviously without direction and bored by the fact. They wanted high excitement.

“We’ll stay three days and then go home. I’ll call right away for steamer tickets.”

At the hotel the girl made the reservation in French. When they were installed on the ground floor she walked through the French windows and out onto the stone veranda that ran the length of the hotel. When she walked she carried herself like a ballet-dancer. Out there the hot sun was too bright to see. Fifty yards away the Mediterranean melted in the sunshine.

Indeed, of all the region only the beach was alive with activity. Three British nannies sat knitting sweaters and socks; closer to the sea a dozen persons stayed under umbrellas, while their dozen children chased fish through the shallows or lay naked out in the sun.

As Rosemary came onto the beach a boy of twelve ran past her and dashed into the sea. Feeling the looks of strange faces, she took off her bathrobe and followed. She swam face down for a few yards and finding it shallow stood on her feet and went forward. When it was about breast high, she glanced back toward shore: a bald man in a monocle and a pair of tights was regarding her attentively. As Rosemary returned the gaze the man put the monocle aside and poured himself a glass of something from a bottle in his hand.

Rosemary laid her face on the water and swam out to the raft. Reaching it, she was out of breath, but a tanned woman with very white teeth looked down at her, and Rosemary, suddenly conscious of the whiteness of her own body, turned on her back and drifted toward shore. The hairy man holding the bottle spoke to her as she came out.

“I say – they have sharks out behind the raft.” He spoke English with a slow Oxford drawl. “Yesterday they ate two British sailors from the flotte at Golfe Juan^[5].”

“Heavens!^[6]” exclaimed Rosemary.

Rosemary looked for a place to sit. Obviously each family possessed the strip of sand immediately in front of its umbrella; besides there was much visiting and talking back and forth – the atmosphere of a community. Farther up, sat a group with flesh as white as her own. They lay under small hand-parasols instead of beach umbrellas. Between the dark people and the light, Rosemary found room and spread out her peignoir on the sand.

Lying so, she first heard their voices. Presently her ear distinguished individual voices and she became aware that some one had kidnapped a waiter from a café in Cannes^[7]

last night in order to saw him in two. The sponsor of the story was a white-haired woman in full evening dress, obviously of the previous evening. Rosemary, forming a vague antipathy to her and her companions, turned away.

Nearest her, on the other side, a young woman lay under a roof of umbrellas. Her bathing suit was pulled off her shoulders and her back. On the neck she was wearing pearls. Her face was hard and lovely and pitiful. Her eyes met Rosemary’s but did not see her. Beyond her was a fine man in a jockey cap and red-striped tights; then the woman Rosemary had seen on the raft; then a man with a long face and a golden, leonine head, with blue tights and no hat, talking very seriously to a Latin young man^[8] in black tights. She thought they were mostly Americans, but something made them unlike the Americans she had known.

The man of the monocle and bottle spoke suddenly out of the sky above Rosemary.

“You are a ripping swimmer^[9]. Jolly good. My name is Campion. Here is a lady who says she saw you in Sorrento last week and knows who you are and would so like to meet you.”

Glancing around with annoyance Rosemary saw the untanned people were waiting. Reluctantly she got up and went over to them.

“Mrs. Abrams – Mrs. McKisco – Mr. McKisco – Mr. Dumphry —

“We know who you are,” spoke up the woman in evening dress. “You’re Rosemary Hoyt and I recognized you in Sorrento and asked the hotel clerk and we all think you’re perfectly marvellous and we want to know why you’re not back in America making another marvellous moving picture.”

“We wanted to warn you about getting burned the first day,” she continued cheerily, “because YOUR skin is important, but there seems to be so darn much formality on this beach that we didn’t know whether you’d mind^[10].”

Chapter 2

“We thought maybe you were in the plot^[11],” said Mrs. McKisco, a pretty young woman. “We don’t know who’s in the plot and who isn’t. One man, my husband had been particularly nice to, turned out to be a chief character.”

“The plot?” inquired Rosemary, half understanding. “Is there a plot?”

“My dear, we don’t KNOW,” said Mrs. Abrams, with a chuckle. “We’re not in it. We’re the gallery.”

Mr. McKisco, a skinny, freckled man of thirty, did not find the topic of the “plot” amusing. He had been staring at the sea – now he turned to Rosemary and asked:

“Been here long?”

“Only a day.”

“Oh.”

Evidently feeling that the subject had been changed, he looked in turn at the others.

“Going to stay all summer?” asked Mrs. McKisco, innocently. “If you do you can watch the plot develop.”

“For God’s sake, Violet, drop the subject!” exploded her husband. “Get a new joke, for God’s sake!”

Mrs. McKisco bent toward Mrs. Abrams and said:

“He’s nervous.”

“I’m not nervous,” disagreed McKisco. “It just happens I’m not nervous at all.”

He got up to go in the water, followed by his wife, and seizing the opportunity^[12] Rosemary followed.

Mr. McKisco drew a long breath, flung himself into the shallows and began swimming in the Mediterranean— soon he was short of breath, looked around with an expression of surprise that he could still see the shore.

“I haven’t learned to breathe yet. I never quite understood how they breathed.” He looked at Rosemary.

“I think you breathe out under water,” she explained. “And every fourth beat you lift your head over for air.”

“The breathing’s the hardest part for me. Shall we go to the raft?”

The man with the leonine head lay stretched out upon the raft, which moved back and forth with the motion of the water. As Mrs. McKisco reached for it, the man pulled her on board.

“I was afraid it hit you.” His voice was slow and shy; he had one of the saddest faces Rosemary had ever seen, the high cheekbones of an Indian, and enormous deep-set dark golden eyes. In a minute he had pushed off into the water and his long body lay motionless toward shore.

Rosemary and Mrs. McKisco watched him. He abruptly bent double, his thin thighs rose above the surface, and he disappeared totally.

“He’s a good swimmer,” Rosemary said.

Mrs. McKisco’s answer came with surprising violence.

“Well, he’s a rotten musician.” She turned to her husband, who after two unsuccessful attempts had managed to climb on the raft. “I was just saying that Abe North may be a good swimmer but he’s a rotten musician.”

“Yes,” agreed McKisco, grudgingly. Obviously he had created his wife’s world of opinions.

The woman of the pearls had joined her two children in the water, and now Abe North came up under one of them like a volcanic island, raising him on his shoulders. The child yelled with fear and delight and the woman watched with a lovely peace, without a smile.

“Is that his wife?” Rosemary asked.

“No, that’s Mrs. Diver. They’re not at the hotel.” After a moment she turned to Rosemary.

“Have you been abroad before?”

“Yes – I went to school in Paris.”

“Oh! Well, then you probably know that if you want to enjoy yourself here the thing is to get to know some real French families. They just stick around with each other in little groups. Of course, we had letters of introduction and met all the best French artists and writers in Paris. That made it very nice.”

“I should think so.”

“My husband is finishing his first novel, you see.”

Rosemary said: “Oh, he is?” She was not thinking anything special, except wondering whether her mother had got to sleep in this heat.

She swam back to the shore, where she threw her peignoir over her already sore shoulders and lay down again in the sun. The man with the jockey cap was now going from umbrella to umbrella carrying a bottle and little glasses in his hands; presently he and his friends grew livelier and closer together under one big umbrella – she understood that some one was leaving and that this was a last drink on the beach. Excitement was generating under that umbrella – and it seemed to Rosemary that it all came from the man in the jockey cap.

Campion walked near her, stood a few feet away and Rosemary closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep; then she fell really asleep.

She awoke to find the beach deserted save for the man in the jockey cap, who was folding a last umbrella. As Rosemary lay blinking, he walked nearer and said:

“I was going to wake you before I left. It’s not good to get too burned right away.”

“Thank you.” Rosemary looked down at her crimson legs.

“Heavens!”

She laughed cheerfully, inviting him to talk, but Dick Diver was already carrying a tent and a beach umbrella up to a waiting car, so she went into the water. He came back, collected his things and glanced up and down the beach to see if he had left anything.

“Do you know what time it is?” Rosemary asked.

“It’s about half-past one.”

He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue worlds of his eyes. Then he shouldered his last piece of junk and went up to his car, and Rosemary came out of the water, shook out her peignoir and walked up to the hotel.