Major Herbert
Clandon-Hartley
English
Buxton
Mrs. Maria
Clandon-Hartley
English
Buxton
Herr Emil Schimler
German
Berlin
Albert Koche (manager)
Swiss
Schaffhausen
Suzanne Koche (wife)
Swiss
Schaffhausen
A similar list of guests might have been compiled from almost any other small pension in the south of France. There was the inevitable English army man and his wife. There were the Americans, not quite so inevitable, but by no means unusual. There were the Swiss, and there was the sprinkling of French. The solitary German was odd, but not unduly so. Swiss hotel managers and their wives were common enough.
What was I to do? Where should I start? Then I remembered Beghin’s instructions about the cameras. I was to find out which of them had cameras and then report. I seized on this positive line of thought eagerly.
The obvious method seemed to be to engage them in conversation one by one, or couple by couple, and bring up the subject of photography. But that was no use. Supposing the spy had already discovered that his photographs were missing, that instead of his pictures of concrete and guns he had some lively low-angle shots of a carnival at Nice? Even if he did not immediately realize that he had somebody else’s camera, he would know that something had gone wrong and be on his guard. Anyone attempting to get conversational on the subject of photography would excite his suspicions. I must proceed by less direct means.
I glanced at my watch. The time was a quarter to seven. From the window I could see that the beach was still occupied. There were a pair of shoes and a small sunshade lying on the strip of sand visible from my room. I combed my hair and went out.
Some people can strike up casual acquaintances with the greatest ease. They possess some mysterious flexible quality of mind that enables them to adjust their mental processes rapidly to conform with those of the strangers facing them. In an instant they have identified themselves with the stranger’s interests. They smile. The strangers respond. There is a question and a reply. A minute later they are friends, chatting away amicably of trifles.
I do not possess this engaging faculty. I do not speak at all unless spoken to. Even then, nervousness allied to a desperate wish to be friendly renders me either stiff and formal or over-effusive. As a result of this, strangers either think me morose or suspect me of trying to work a confidence trick.
As I walked down the stone steps to the beach, however, I made up my mind that, for once at any rate, I would have to shed my inhibitions. I must be confident and friendly, I must think of amusing things to say, I must manage the conversation, be subtle. I had work to do.
The small beach was now in complete shadow and a faint breeze off the sea was beginning to stir the tops of the trees; but it was still very warm. I could see the heads of two men and two women over the backs of the deck- chairs in which their owners were sitting; and as I neared the foot of the steps I could hear that they were attempting to carry on a conversation in French.
I walked across the sand, sat a few meters from them on the end of one of the trestles on which the dinghy was being painted, and gazed out across the bay.
From the quick look I had got in as I sat down I knew that in the two chairs nearest me were a young man of about twenty-three and a girl of about twenty. They had been swimming, and it was evidently their brown legs that I had seen from the terrace that morning. I judged from their French that these were the two Americans, Warren and Mary Skelton.
The other two were very different. Both were middle-aged and very fat. I remembered having noticed them before. The man had a beaming moonlike face and a torso that from a distance looked almost spherical. This illusion was due in some measure to the trousers he wore. They were of some dark material and had very short, narrow legs. The tops of them, already very high, were drawn up over his round belly almost to his armpits by very powerful suspenders. He wore a tennis shirt open at the neck and no jacket. He might have walked out of a cartoon in Simplicissimus. His wife, for these were the Swiss, was slightly taller than him and very untidy. She laughed a great deal and even when she was not actually laughing she looked as if she were about to do so. Her husband beamed in concert with her. They both appeared as simple and unselfconscious as a pair of small children.
It seemed that Skelton was trying to explain the American political system to Herr Vogel.
“Il y a,” he was saying laboriously, “deux parties seulement, les Republicaines et les Democrates. Ces sont du droit-tous les deux. Mais les Republicaines sont plus au droit que les Democrates. Ca c’est la difference.”
“Ah oui, je comprend,” said Herr Vogel. He hurriedly translated the sense into German. Frau Vogel grinned broadly.
“One hears,” pursued her husband in his clipped French, “that the gangsters (he pronounced it “garngstairs”) have a decisive influence during the elections. Like a party of the center, perhaps?” He had the air of one putting aside frivolous small talk in favor of graver matters.
The girl giggled helplessly. Her brother drew a deep breath and began to explain with great care, and to Herr Vogel’s evident amazement, that ninety-nine point nine per cent of the people of the United States had never seen a gangster. But his French soon gave out.
“Il y a, sans doute,” he was admitting, “une quantite de… quelque
…” He could get no farther. “Mary,” he said plaintively, “what the hell’s the word for graft?”
At that moment fortune favored me. It may be that teaching becomes a habit, that the impulse to instruct will, like hunger or fear, overcome social inhibitions. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the girl shrug her shoulders helplessly; a fraction of a second later the words were out of my mouth.
“Chantage is the word you want.”
They all looked at me.
“Oh, thanks,” said the girl.
An eager light came into her brother’s eye.
“Do you speak French as well as English?”
“Yes.”
“Then,” he said, tartly, “do you mind telling this moron here on our left that gangster is spelt with a small ‘g’ in America, and they’re not represented in Congress. At least, not openly. You might add, too, while you’re about it, that all our food doesn’t come out of cans, and that we don’t all live in the Empire State Building.”
“Certainly.”
The girl smiled.
“My brother’s not serious.”
“Aren’t I, by heaven! He’s an international menace. Someone ought to tell him.”
The Vogels had been listening to this exchange with bewildered smiles on their faces. I translated, as tactfully as possible, into German. They rocked with laughter. Between paroxysms, Herr Vogel explained that it was impossible not to tease Americans. A party of garngstair! The Empire State Building! There were fresh peals of laughter. The Swiss were evidently not quite so naive as they looked.
“What’s the matter with him now?” demanded Skelton.
I explained. He grinned.
“You wouldn’t think they had any guile in them, would you?” he said, and leaned forward to get a better view of the Vogels. “What are they, Germans?”
“Swiss, I think.”
