by Anne Nesbet
First of all, Uncle Dan’s camera was there, and the lights were blazing, but her uncles were nowhere to be seen. Darleen looked around in consternation. Had they gotten the timing wrong somehow? Should she just stand around until Uncle Dan appeared? A single episode of The Dangers of Darleen used two reels of film and lasted about thirty minutes. That meant there wasn’t much time to waste. Soon enough, Episode Eight would end, and the crowd would swell through these doors at intermission, ruining all possible shots.
And just as she was thinking these grumpy thoughts, two things happened:
A man in an ill-fitting jacket came slithering out the theater doors (slithering was the word! Darleen had never seen a human being who moved so very like a snake!) and glanced around wildly. He looked like someone who had just lost something terribly important and was sure he would soon be in heaps of trouble. But before Darleen could finish imagining her list of things this man might have lost (a champion poodle? his wife’s emerald brooch?), a hulking black motorcar squealed around the corner and stopped abruptly, right in front of the theater.
The worried man leaped forward as if he had been expecting this car and yanked its front door open.
“Couldn’t find the girl!” he cried, and then there was a stream of angry shouting from the driver, who wanted the side-winding man to shut up, to not be an idiot, to stop leaving everything for him, the driver, to do, and to hurry up and get in out of those lights.
The side-winding man, still confused, tried to peer into the back of the car. He was being very slow about opening that door.
Oh, bother, thought Darleen. Does everyone in this world have to be so screamingly incompetent all the time?
And then she glanced left, and there was Uncle Dan, racing back to his camera, followed by Uncle Charlie. “Something came up at the side entrance!” Uncle Charlie seemed to be saying. But then he saw what was happening here and changed his comments to “Go, go!”
Maybe the scene could still be saved, then. Darleen hurried up to that side-winding man as fast as she could manage while still pretending to be anxiously looking at her note. She practically had to bump into him to get his attention, however. What an amateur this actor was proving to be! She did that thing of pretending to pull away while he turned and gaped at her, his right hand on the open motorcar door, and his eyes darting from Darleen to the cameraman behind her. Incompetent beginner! Even the silliest extras knew better than to cast wild-eyed looks at the camera — or to freeze in front of it.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, be quick!” Darleen hissed at him, trying to maintain a terrified expression for Uncle Dan’s camera. “You’re supposed to get that door open and push me in! Or move out of the way, at least!”
Thank goodness moving-picture cameras could not record the words anyone said!
It had started badly, but the stunt turned out remarkably well. The side-winding man opened the back door, and Darleen managed to tumble into the car quite as if he had pushed her himself — just as another hulking black automobile squealed up behind them. What was that about? Darleen didn’t remember a second car being part of the plan.
There was a lot of shouting. Uncle Charlie shouted, and the men jumping out of the second car shouted, and the driver of this car spat some very harsh words at the incompetent side-winding man, who was still just standing there, gaping at the door.
That was when the sidewinder finally woke up. He slammed the back door behind Darleen, jumped into the front seat, and slammed that door, too. The fancy motorcar lurched forward and away, as if it were the only thing in this whole sorry crew that had remembered all its lines.
The driver and the side-winding man kept shouting at each other in the front of the car. As well they might, considering how they had mangled this entire operation. Still, the driver seemed to be courting another kind of disaster, to be driving so fast while carrying on an argument with the sidewinder sitting next to him. Darleen was trying to think of some way to address the issue tactfully — because she knew that “Slow down” almost never actually worked, when addressed to an overheated driver — when something bumped into her feet.
Something moving! At her feet!
She took a closer look: there was a large lump wriggling on the dim floor of the motorcar — a roughly human-shaped lump with a large burlap sack over its head and with feet wearing a pair of shoes made from what looked like good leather.
Darleen gasped. What else had these amateurs gotten wrong? But before her mind could form another coherent thought, her hands were already pulling the burlap sack off the lump’s head, and her arms were hauling the lump up from the floor to the seat of the motorcar.
“Oh, no!” said the lump and Darleen, both at the same time.
Because the lump was not merely a lump. It was a girl!
This girl, whoever she was, seemed to be about the same size as Darleen. In the gloom it was hard to tell what she looked like exactly, but her voice was pleasant, and her dress gave a general rustling impression of elegance. In the colorless flicker of light and shadow from the streetlights, she looked, to tell the truth, almost like a character in a photoplay.
This girl was looking at Darleen with as much distress as Darleen herself felt.
“My heavens, you poor thing,” said the girl. “What have these wretched criminals done now?”
Considering that the mysterious girl had just emerged from confinement in a burlap sack, her worries about Darleen seemed very generous — indeed, almost out of place. And the full horror of this situation was beginning to dawn on Darleen.
“What they’ve done is — they’ve made a mistake!” she found herself saying. “Oh, how awful, I’m so sorry. We have to tell them — we have to stop this motorcar — to take you back. Hey, misters!”
And she was so horrified that she leaned right up to interrupt the arguing men in the front seat as the car lurched its way uptown, but before she could say another word, the girl put a warning hand on her arm.
“Oh, do be cautious! I’m afraid they’re dangerous, desperate men. The driver has a firearm. I saw it! And then he put the sack over my head —”
“A firearm? That’s got to be a prop,” said Darleen, feeling oddly short of oxygen.
“A prop? You mean, a theatrical property? Only for the stage? No, I don’t think so,” said the other girl. “I’m afraid I recognize the make from sad experience in the West.”
What? thought Darleen. And that what went very deep indeed, through layer after layer of Darleen’s mind and soul.
“So we mustn’t provoke them,” said the girl. “But, oh, dear, why have they taken you? What a dreadful thing this is. We have to find some way to reason with them, to explain about you. I can’t bear the thought of an innocent bystander being swept up into my troubles.”
Darleen had to digest that speech for a moment. Weren’t these Darleen’s troubles they were both mixed up in at the moment?
Then she said, a degree more feebly than before, “Excuse me, but I’m pretty sure you are the innocent stander-by here, and I’m sorry. They were supposed to be looking out for me. They knew I would be waiting out in front. How could they have messed up so badly? And wherever did they find you? The uncles will be awfully embarrassed when these idiots show up with two girls instead of one. I’m so sorry. It’s an awful mistake they’ve made. An awful, terrible mistake.”
The two girls looked at each other in silence — two shadowy faces lit up by the little lightning flares of streetlamps — while the motorcar sped recklessly through the busy streets of New York, jostling its back-seat prisoners quite roughly as it went.
“How strange,” said the other girl. “You seem to believe these awful men meant to abduct you, but why would you think such a thing? And — if I may — are we possibly acquainted? There is something about your face, although of course it’s rather dim in this motorcar, that seems so very familiar. ‘Better to confess a forgotten name right away than to writhe in internal agony all through dinner’ —
that’s what my dear Grandmama used to say.”
And she reached forth a delicate, kid-gloved hand.
“I am Victorine Berryman, and if I should know your name and have forgotten it, I do apologize sincerely.”
Victorine Berryman!
For a moment Darleen could not manage to speak a coherent word beyond “Oh!” — though she did remember to take the offered hand.
Miss Victorine Berryman!
But that was the Poor Little Rich Girl herself, orphaned scion of the Berryman railroad empire! She had been in the papers quite a bit over the course of the past year. All those stories about how the matriarch of the Berryman clan had raised her granddaughter while traveling in luxury to all corners of the globe. And then the grandmother had very recently died, and there had been a search of some kind for relatives to take charge of the orphaned heiress. “And dine off her diamonds, no doubt,” Aunt Shirley had said, tut-tutting and shaking her head. “The vultures will gather, poor lamb, mark my words!”
All of that was flooding through Darleen’s memory, so she said only, “Oh!” another time, or maybe twice more, as ideas began to bump into other ideas in her head.
“And you?” said Miss Berryman. “Poor dear girl, I know this must all be such a terrible shock. I confess I’m quite shocked myself.”
“Oh, but I’m Darleen!” said Darleen in a rush, remembering her etiquette. “Darleen Darling.”
Miss Berryman’s face lit up as if a spotlight had just been turned upon it.
“Daring Darleen!” she said, and suddenly she looked so much younger. Really, she had to be almost the exact age and size of Dar herself, despite her fancy way of speaking. “Oh, can it be? Miss Darling! But it’s as if I’ve fallen right into a photoplay! Daring Darleen — yes, of course, if we weren’t in this terrible gloom, I surely would have recognized your face right away! Oh, wonderful! I was just watching your picture when the notice came, calling me so urgently to the side entrance. But never mind that. So you are here to rescue me!”
“Rescue you?” said Darleen. “Oh, no, it’s all pretend, Miss Berryman. I’m sure you must know that. It’s for the advertising, you know. They are pretending to kidnap me, but really they’ll just hurry me back to Fort Lee. It’s all a stunt, that’s all it is — something to draw the public in.”
At that moment, they were flung quite hard against the partition between the front and back seats of that motorcar as it screeched to a sudden halt. The driver turned around to look through the gap in the partition. He had a glinting pistol in his hand, although there was no camera clickety-clacking away anywhere around to justify such overacting.
“WHICH OF YOU IS THE BERRYMAN GIRL?” he snarled at them.
Darleen’s breath caught in her throat, and Miss Berryman, next to her, gasped too. They were surely both realizing at this very moment that the two of them, although not exactly what anyone would call identical in appearance, in fact both had more or less brown hair and were about the same size. What’s more, both were wearing white dresses (though in a little more light anyone who knew anything about dresses should have been able to see that one of those dresses came for $1.55 out of the Sears, Roebuck and Company catalogue, and the other was made of pure silk and might well have cost a hundred whole dollars, for all Darleen knew). Could it be — was it possible? — that the kidnappers really did not themselves know who was who? Because if so —
The girls clasped hands. It was strengthening to feel another hand holding on to your own.
“Why do you ask, sir?” said Miss Berryman, with only the faintest wobble in her voice. “And I do beseech you to lower your weapon. It is most disconcerting, and unnecessary.”
“AND WHAT WAS THAT MAN DOING WITH THAT WOODEN BOX WITH THE TELESCOPE STUCK ON IT?”
“Anyone should know that. He was taking pictures,” said Darleen, and she could hear the terror in her own voice, but a light bulb had just gone on in her head: Uncle Dan! These ruffians had better know they had not committed this crime in the dark, as it were. They had left a trace of themselves behind. “He’s a cameraman. He was making a photoplay. I’m sure there will be pictures of what you did.”
And while the stocky, dangerously armed driver and the side-winding man started another round of shouting at each other, Miss Berryman leaned close to Darleen and said, with a gentle squeeze of the hand, “As my Grandmama used to say, we will now have to think on our feet. And at least we can be grateful for one thing: we know that your feet are especially clever!”
Truth to tell, no part of Darleen felt particularly clever at that moment — not her brain, not her ears, not her feet. Her limbs, in fact, were beginning to tremble. Something had gone seriously wrong with her fake kidnapping. That was all that she knew for sure.
The side-winding man had just jumped out of the car and was now glancing nervously up and down the street.
“But it’s all some kind of terrible mistake,” said Dar. She felt flushed and odd, like she was coming down with a fever. “It simply has to be.”
“Look out now, Miss Darling. He’s going to open the door,” said Miss Berryman, and indeed, the door of the motorcar was flung wide, and the man out there was whisper-shouting for them to Get out, get out quick, and not cause any trouble!
Darleen glanced up and down the dark street and saw absolutely no one about, nor even a street corner that seemed reachable before the driver could make use of his pistol. Not to mention the fact that running away is much harder when there are two of you, and the second one of you is still in the process of emerging from the motorcar. What should they do? Shout? Run? But even as these thoughts raced through Darleen’s mind, it was already too late to act on them. The side-winding man had clamped a firm hand on her arm, and a moment later he and the driver were urging them up the stairs of this not-very-lovely building.
“Don’t you fret, now, missies,” the driver was saying. “You be nice girlies, and maybe no harm will come to a single hair of your pretty heads.”
That made Darleen’s own actual scalp tingle with alarm.
The men hurried them in through the front door and then up three flights of stairs, with occasional glares and hissed reminders to keep quiet, although the kidnappers’ own clumsy feet were making almost all of the noise. A minute later, they were in a not-very-fancy apartment, lit by the newfangled glare of electric lights, and a thin woman with angular eyebrows was putting her hand to her mouth in surprise.
“Two of ’em?” she said. “What have you oafs gone and done?”
That was a good question, thought Darleen, quite aglow with outrage.
“Well, now, we’ve had a bit of an accident, Sally,” said the driver, and he bent his head a little in apology. To Dar’s eyes he looked like a poor actor impersonating a schoolboy about to be scolded.
“A what?” said Sally, and then her voice became sharper: “A what?”
“A naccident!” said the side-winding man. “One girlie we got at the side entrance, and the other out in front! Didn’t mean to take two of ’em!”
“Oh, now, what?” said the woman called Sally. She was so angry that she took breaks between words to clench her lips tight. “Which one’s our little pigeon, then? And which one’s the extra baggage?”
That was when the driver said, “It was awfully dark, Sally.”
And then the side-winding man said, “Except when the lights were blinding. We couldn’t see anything, what for the lights, and then the dark. They was taking pitchers. I bet one of these girlies is a nactress, but I dunno which is which.”
Then there was a lot of shouting from Sally about the pitchers being taken and whether the side-winding man had let himself get pinned into some pitcher, like the fool that he was, and how two grown men could be so stupid as to nab two girls when they were meant to nab one — and then not even know which was the right one!
While Sally shouted at the other kidnappers, Darleen squeezed Miss Berryman’s hand, and Miss Berryman nodded very slightly in return. T
hey might have been acquainted for only a few rough minutes, but Darleen was quite sure they were in agreement. It was hard to know whether it was preferable to be the “pigeon” or the “extra baggage” in this particular case, but surely it was better if the kidnappers stayed confused.
There was another pause while Sally grew angrier and angrier and the kidnappers grew twitchier and twitchier under her glare.
“You gals!” snapped Sally. “Who are you? Names! Tell us now, quick-like.”
In a photoplay, Crown Princess Dahlia Louise might have stood tall and proud at this moment, might have flashed her eyes in defiance and announced (with the help of a written intertitle), “I AM THE CROWN PRINCESS DAHLIA LOUISE!” But of course, Crown Princess Dahlia Louise, being fictional, had a certain advantage, didn’t she? The photoplay might have her imprisoned and imperiled, but it would also always give her some, usually unlikely, way out of trouble. In real life, standing in front of real villains without any rescue written into the script, it turns out to be much harder to know what one should say.
“Do pardon me,” said Miss Berryman, “but I’m quite sure the first question here should be, Who are you? And why have you brought us here, and so ungently?”
That was very brave of Miss Berryman. Darleen could tell she was secretly frightened underneath, however. She was speaking with as much dignity as possible, but Darleen was holding her hand and could feel her fingers trembling.
“Ungently!” sneered Sally. “Ha-ha! That’s rich! I’ll show you what ungently looks like, believe you me, if you keep taking that tone, you snooty gal. Don’t waste our time. What’s your name? Don’t be lying to me now.”
“Lying!” said Miss Berryman, her voice suddenly much less brave. Indeed, she seemed almost thunderstruck. “Oh, dear, is that what it is? Is it lying not to answer your questions? Oh, dear. It’s just that —”
“It’s just that we insist that you release us from this miserable place, and right away!” said Darleen, shamelessly interrupting. Miss Berryman seemed to be getting herself distracted from the main point, which, as far as Darleen was concerned, was getting safely out of there. Darleen did try to make her interrupting voice sound as high-class as possible: “Release us and take us home! Immediately! Because this is . . .”
