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 —
