On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about halfway between Marseilles and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rose-colored hotel. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only the dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed pines near Cannes, five miles away.
A mile from the sea, where pines give way to dusty poplars, is an isolated railroad stop. From where one June morning in 1925 a train brought a woman and her daughter down to the hotel. The mother’s face was of a fading prettiness that would soon be patted with broken veins, However, one’s eye moved on quickly to her daughter, who had magic in her pink palms and her cheeks lit to a lovely flame like the thrilling flush of children after their cold baths in the evening. Her eyes were bright, big, clear, wet, and shining; the color of her cheeks was real, breaking close to the surgace
from the strong young pump of her heart. Her body hovered delicately on the last edge of childhood-she was almost eighteen, nearly complete, the dew was still but on her.
“ something tells me we are not going to like this place,” remarked the mother.
I want to go home anyhow the girl answered We woll stay three days and then go home At the hotel the girl made the reservation in rather flat French, like something remembered. After settling in. Rosemary the girl went to the beach where a boy of twelve ran past her and dashed into the sea with excited cries. Feeling the scrutiny of strange faves she tool offher bathrobe and followed.
When the water was about breast high she glanced back toward shire a bald man his hairy chest thrown out was regarding her attentively .as rosemary returned the gaze the man tool off his glasses.
Rosemary laid her face on the water and swam out to the heat trickling in her hair ang ran
into the corners of her of her body she turned round and round in it embracing it reaching the raft she was out of breath nut a tanned woman with very white teeth looked down at her and rosemary suddenly conscious of the raw whiteness of her own body, turned on her back and drifted toward shore the hairy man holding a bottle spoke to her as she came out. “I say, they have sharks out behind the raft.” He was of indeterminate nationality, but spoke English with a slow Oxford accent. Yesterday they devoured two British sailors from a port nearby.”
“Heavens!”exclaimed Rosemary.
Glazing his eyes to indicate that he had only spoken in order to warm her, he walked off to pour himself another drink.
Not unpleasantly self-conscious, since there had been a slight away of attention toward her during this conversation, 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 upon which it would be unmannerly to intrude. Farther up sat a group with flesh as white as her own.They lay under small umbrellas instead of beach umbrellas and were obviously of a community upon which it would be unmannerly to intrude. Farther up sat a group with flesh as white as her own. They lay under small umbrellas instead of beach umbrellas and were obviously not as accustomed to the area, while the tanned fashionable-looking group sat closer to the beach. Between the dark people and the light, Rosemary found room and spread out her bathrobe on the sand.
Lying so, she first heard their voices and felt their feet skirt her body and their shapes pass between the sun and herself. Presently her car distinguished individual voices. Rosemary, forming a vague aversion to the woman in a full evening gown who was speaking loudly,
turned away.
On the other side, a young woman lay under an umbrella, her back an orange brown, set off by a string of creamy pearls, shining in the sand. 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, sitting among other equally tanned vacationers. Sher thought they were mostly Americans, but something made them unlike the Americans she had known of late. After awhile, as she heard bursts of laughter, she realized that the man in the jockey cap was giving a quiet little performance for this group. The man who had warned her about the sharks suddenly spoke above Rosemary. “You are a ripping swimmer.” She objected.
“Jolly good. My name is campion .Here is a lady who says she saw you on Sorrento last week and knows who you are and would so like to meet to meet you.”
Glancing around with concealed annoyance Rosemary saw the pale people were waiting. Reluctantly she got up and went over to them. “Mrs Abrams, Mrs McKisco, Mr Dumphry-” “We known who you are,” spoke up the woman in the evening dress. “You are Rosemary Hoyt and I recognized you in Sorrento and asked the hotel clerk and we all think you are perfectly marvelous and we want to know why you are not back in America making another marvelous moving picture.” They made a gesture of moving over for her. “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 much formality on this beach that we didnot know whether you had mind.”
Mr mckisco, a slight and freckled man of thirty, did not find his wife’s chatter amusing. He had been starting at the sea- now after aswift glance at his wife he turned to Rosemary and demanded aggressively, “Been here long?”
“Only a day.”
Evidently feeling that the subject had been thoroughly changed, he look in turn at the others.
The group looked out to sea, watching a man swim swiftly to the raft, which tipped back and forth with the motion of the water. When he had exhausted his momentum he abruptly bent double, his thin thighs rose above the surface, and he disappeared totally.
“He is a good swimmer,” Rosemary said.
Mrs. McKisco’s answer came with surprising violence. “Well, he is a rotten musician.”She turned to her husband,“I was just saying that Abe North may be a good swimmer, but he is a rotten musician.”
“Yes,”agreed McKisco, grudgingly. Obviously he had created his wife’s world, and allowed her few liberties in it.
The woman of the pearls had joined her two children in the water, and now Abe North, the strong swimmer, 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 is Mrs.Diver. They are not at the hotel.” Mrs. Mckisco’s eyes, photographic, did not move from the woman’s face. After a moment she turned abruptly 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. What do these people get out of it?” She pointed her left shoulder toward shore to the tanned group. “They just stick around with each other in little clubs. 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.”
“Oh, he is?” Rosemary asked carelessly. She was just wondering whether her mother had got to sleep in this heat.
“It is on the idea of Ulysses-” Continued Mrs Mckisco .
“Oh, for God’s sake, Violet, don’t go telling everybody the idea,” protested McKisco. “I don’t want it to get all around before the book’s published.”
Rosemary again laid down on her dress and saw the man in 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 and now they were all under asingle assemblage of umbrellas- she gathered that someone was leaving and that this was aladt drink on the man in the jockey cap.
Campion walked near her, stood a few feet away and Rosemary closed her eyes, pretending to be asleep. At last Rosemary did
indeed fall asleep.
She awoke soaked with sweat 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 is 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 a waiting car, so she went into the water to wash off the sweat. He came back and gathered up a rake and shovel. He glanced up and down the beach to see if he had left anything.
“Do you know what time it is?” Rosemary asked.
“It is about half past one.”
He looked at her and for a moment she lived in the bright blue world of his eyes, eagerly and confidently. Then he shouldered his last piece
of junk and went to his car, and Rosemary came out of the water, shook out her dress and walked up to the hotel.
It was almost two when Rosemary and her mother went into the dining room. Back and forth over the deserted tables a heavy pattern of beams and shadows swayed with the motion of pines outside.
“I fell in love on the beach,” said Rosemary. “Who with?”
“First with a whole lot of people who looked nice. Then with one man.” “Did you talk to him?”
“Just a little. Very handsome. With reddish hair.” She was eating greedily. “He is married though-it’s usually the way.”
Her mother was her best friend, who gad put every last possibility into the guiding of her, not so rare a thing in the theatrical profession, but rather special in that Mrs. Elsie Speers did not do this to make herself feel better for her own defeat. She had no personal bitterness or
resentments about life- twice satisfactorily married and twice widowed, her cheerful indifference had each time deepened.
One of her husband had been a military officer and one an army doctor; they both keft something to her that she tried to present intact to Rosemary. By not sparing Rosemary she had made her hard by not sparing her own labor and devotion she had cultivated an idealism in Rosemary, which at present was directed toward herself and saw the world through her eyes. So that while Rosemary was a “simple” child, she was protected by not only her mother’s armor but her own as well- she had a mature distrust of the trivial, the facile and the vulgar. However, with Rosemary’s sudden success in pictures Mrs. Speers felt that it was time she were spiritually disengaged; it would please rather than pain her if this somewhat bouncing, breathless and exacting idealism would focus on something except herself.
“Then you like it here?” Mrs.Speers asked. “It might be fun of we knew those people. There were some other people, but they weren’t nice. They recognized me-no matter where we go everybody’s seen ‘Daddy’s Girl’”
Mrs.Speers waited for the glow of egotism to subside; then she said in a matter-of - fact way, “That reminds me, when are you going to see Earl Brady?”
“I thought we might go this afternoon- if you are rested.”
“You go. I am not going.”
“We’ll wait till tomorrow then,” suggested Rosemary.
“I want you to go alone. It’s only a short way. It isn’t as if you didn’t speak French.”
“Mother, are not there some things I do not have to do?”
“Oh, well, then go later, but some day before we leave.”
“All right, Mother.”
After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travelers in quite foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voice
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