Daring Darleen, Queen of the Screen

by Anne Nesbet

  The girls staggered together through the office door and into a very confusing scene indeed, a tangle of heated arguments.

  “There she is now!” said Mr. Brownstone to a policeman, and he pointed an enraged finger in Darleen’s direction. “A wicked girl! No morals! Kidnapper! Lawbreaker! Practically holding my ward prisoner and slandering us all!”

  “That little girlie there?” said the policeman, and he scratched his head. “Which one of you was threatening to jump out of that window?”

  “Nobody,” said Victorine. “I’m Victorine Berryman, and Miss Darling here was merely preparing to climb up the side of the building. Out of necessity. Because this woman and that man and that . . . that strange younger person over there —”

  There was definitely something strange about the man who was supposed to be Victorine’s cousin. He was practically huddling under his hat on the office bench, trying to get as far from Darleen as possible.

  “They are all pretending to be my relatives,” said Victorine. “But they aren’t.”

  “They’re Lukeses!” said Darleen. “I’m sure they are all Lukeses, not Brownstones or Berrymans at all. Impostors!”

  “Oh, now, we can’t have that,” said the policeman. “Nor we can’t have children climbing up buildings, neither. Public disturbance.”

  “But Miss Darling is a professional,” said Victorine. “She is Daring Darleen. Haven’t you seen her in the photoplays?”

  “Daring Darleen?” said the policeman, and his whole demeanor softened for a moment. “Well, now! We think the world of Daring Darleen at my house! Is that a fact!”

  “Then, please just hold these people here until my uncles come,” said Darleen, and she swept her hand around to include all of the Brownstones. “They’re bringing the photograph — the proof — that’ll show who these people really are.”

  “You’re not going to believe anything she says, are you?” said Mr. Brownstone (actually, Lukes). “She’s an actress, not fit to mix with quality. She earns her living telling lies.”

  “Acting is not the same thing as lying, Mr. Lukes,” said Victorine. “And you yourself have told an astonishing number of lies right here and now. Distinctly more than the rest of us.”

  “Speaking of lies, won’t you please ask that young man over there to take off his hat?” said Darleen to the nearest policeman. “He claims to be Hubert Berryman, but he’s not. I’m pretty sure he has dyed his hair black, and if we could just take a look at his ears —”

  “Ears?” said the policeman, but Madame Blaché was already walking over to the young man, and she plucked the hat right from his head. And there, just as Darleen had suspected, was a pair of extraordinarily pointy little ears.

  “See? That’s right. I knew it! That’s Jasper Lukes,” said Darleen.

  Madame Blaché leaned in to get a closer look. Jasper Lukes glowered, but couldn’t come up with a word to say in his own defense.

  Suddenly Darleen felt so tired that she had to sit right down on that bench (but at the end farthest from Jasper Lukes). “Just don’t you let these pretend Brownstones go. You’ll see in the photograph when it comes. That’s Mr. Lukes, and one of his eyes is a fake, I’m pretty sure, and that’s his wife, and that’s Jasper Lukes, whom they left behind all those years ago when they wandered off. I guess they must have wandered back again and caught him up in their nasty plans! He’s an actor, too, by the way. Maybe you’ve watched him in The Dangers of Darleen.”

  “Miss Darling is quite right about this young man here,” said Madame Blaché, eyeing Jasper Lukes. “I have faithfully followed the adventures of Daring Darleen, and this man is without a doubt the villain in those pictures, the one they call the Grand Salamandre. Well, I suppose there’s nothing left for us to do but to wait for these Darling uncles.”

  And she joined Darleen on the bench. Fortunately that bench was quite long.

  The uncles came quite some time later, and as soon as they entered the room and saw Mr. Brownstone, they said, “Oh, if it isn’t Lukes! Where’d you get that extra eye?” That was already very convincing for the policemen and office people watching, especially when Mr. Brownstone snarled back at them like a caged lion and began struggling to get himself out of the policeman’s grasp.

  And then the uncles passed around that old photograph so that everyone could see, plain as plain, that the woman in black had indeed been Claudette Lukes back in the 1890s, and the uncles put their fingers on the blurry man next to her in the photograph and solemnly swore that there was “no mistaking Lukes, even if he did switch his patch for a fancy glass eyeball,” and the baby with the pointy ears (infant Jasper) was no baby Berryman, but a little Lukes. The three were Lukes, Lukes, and Lukes the whole way through.

  But the best thing of all was not the arrival of the uncles; the best thing was the man who pushed through all the police to gather Darleen into his arms: her own dear Papa, beaming with pride.

  “Is it true you’ve been helping our Miss Goodwin in her hour of need?” said Papa. “Good for you!”

  The police were bundling the protesting Brownstones — who were not Brownstones at all — out of the office.

  “My feet weren’t on the ground, Papa,” said Darleen into her father’s dear old ear. “They weren’t at all on the ground.”

  “I suppose sometimes we have to be willing to break a rule here and there,” said her father, “when it’s to rescue a friend.”

  They quite filled Madame Blaché’s motorcar to bursting, but nobody minded the lack of room. By the time they got off the ferry on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, the sky was dark. Henri drove them up the winding roads with skill, however, and they were all so cheerful that the drive went very speedily indeed.

  “Back to the Darlings’ home, please, Henri — past the studios, you know,” said Madame Blaché.

  The Solax Company and the Matchless studios were quite close to each other, and the Darlings’ little house was just on the other side of that street.

  It was such a lovely evening. The moon made the photoplay studios glitter like palaces in fairyland.

  “Go slowly, here, please,” said Madame Blaché, and she turned to Victorine. “Miss Berryman,” she said. “There is something I have been considering — Wait, now! What’s that? Henri, to the right, by the studio wall!”

  Henri showed his dexterity behind the wheel by turning the car suddenly to the right so that the headlights would illuminate the side of the Matchless building.

  And for a second, a surprised face was caught in that bright light. A face and a most suspicious-looking metal can.

  Several voices exclaimed at once in that motorcar.

  “Mon dieu!” cried Madame Blaché. “Can it be? An arsonist! Henri, we must help!”

  “But that’s that kidnapper, back again!” said Victorine in horror. “The one who came looking for me at the Darlings’ house!”

  The uncles both shouted at once.

  Everyone spilled out of the car and sprinted into action as if they had rehearsed this scene a hundred times before. Anyone who had anything to do with the photoplay business knew to fear fire more than anything else in the world.

  The kidnapper went darting off to the left, and Henri raced after him and soon brought him down with a satisfying oomph. (Henri was evidently a motorcar driver with many useful skills, sort of like a human version of Victorine’s folding knife.)

  Madame Blaché ran to the emergency fire bell that hung by the laboratory door and pulled the rope there with vigor, and the bell rang out with all its might. The Darling uncles and Darleen’s Papa ran for water.

  And as the fire bell sang out its urgent alarm, Henri shouted and pointed. The kidnapper had gotten up again and was scrambling away, right past the girls, which was, of course, a bad choice on his part.

  Darleen went for the kidnapper’s right arm at the same moment that Victorine caught his left leg, and they brought him down like a rotten tree.

  “Hold on!” the girls to
ld each other.

  The kidnapper looked satisfyingly terrified in the dim, confused lights cast by the moon, the motorcar’s lights, and the many lanterns coming toward him at a run — and by the flicker of fire at the far end of the studio.

  Voices attached to those approaching lanterns were shouting, “What’s happening? What’s wrong?”

  Madame Blaché said urgently, “Keep those lanterns away! We have arsonists here, I fear! Oh, look! Over there — Fire!”

  “I’m going for the sheriff!” shouted someone.

  And others were calling out, “Water! Water!” and passing along buckets from hand to hand.

  Darleen and Victorine kept holding on to their kidnapper while the flames crept closer along the studio wall.

  “You kidnapper! You villain!” said Darleen. She found she was completely furious with the kidnappers, with Jasper Lukes, with the Brownstones, who were not Brownstones at all — with all the people who had caused them such trouble.

  “It wasn’t my idea!” whined the kidnapper. “It was the boss’s idea! That’s who it was. Mr. Smith! He wanted the girl kidnapped — and dumped in the river too. He wasn’t going to pay no ransom. He wanted the film destroyed. He wanted that big old house burned, and the studio too — it was all Mr. Smith!”

  The flames came nearer, and there was great confusion as more and more help arrived. Fire trumps everything, so before anyone could do anything to help the two girls who had leveled the kidnapper (and arsonist) and were still holding him now, all the arriving crowd attacked the flames. Somebody emptied a bucket of water right over Darleen and Victorine, and still they held on, despite the shock of the cold water in that awfully cold spring air.

  “K-k-k-keep holding on!” said Dar to Victorine, her teeth chattering.

  They kept holding on.

  And then finally, several men materialized all at once to grab the kidnapper, and Darleen and Victorine could roll away from his angry limbs and gasp for breath and shiver, a few feet away from the main action.

  “Fire’s out!” someone down the line finally shouted. “Checking for sparks and cinders!”

  “The studio,” said Darleen in disbelief. “They were really trying to burn down the studio!”

  “Warn’t my idea!” said the kidnapper. “It was Mr. Smith’s!”

  “Oh, right, ‘Mr. Smith,’” said the local sheriff, who already had the kidnapper firmly by the arm. “Tell me another one, why don’t you. Why there’s probably a hundred thousand Smiths in New York City alone. And it’s been quite the day for fires, seems like. Over in the city they say that the Berryman mansion went up in flames this afternoon. Quite the show.”

  “What?” said Dar, and Victorine said, “Oh, no!”

  The sheriff was too busy having the kidnapper tied up to notice that the girls who had captured him were clinging together now like they had suffered a great shock.

  “Come on, boys, help me get this rotter into the wagon now.”

  “Mr. Smith,” insisted the kidnapper. “He lives in New York! ‘Burn everything’ — that’s what he said. For the insurance, I guess. He’s a wealthy sort of man. The wealthy ones like burning things. He has a glass eye, he does! ‘Dump the girl in the river,’ that’s what he said, first off. And then, ‘Burn it all down!’”

  “But that’s got to be Mr. Brownstone he’s talking about,” said Darleen. “Which is to say, not Mr. Brownstone at all, but Mr. Lukes. Your ‘Mr. Smith’ is in jail, you awful man.”

  Victorine was standing very still there in the dark. Darleen could feel her trembling, though, as the sheriff and the kidnapper moved farther away.

  “I will be brave,” she was saying. “I will be brave. It was just a house. Without Grandmama there, it was just an empty house.”

  “And you aren’t alone,” said Darleen in a whisper.

  “No,” said Victorine, although her voice wobbled for a moment as she took Darleen’s hand. “Not alone. And to think, Darleen — you didn’t only rescue me. You even rescued Theo!”

  An hour later, everyone was gathered around the table in the Darlings’ cozy kitchen: Darleen, Victorine, Darleen’s Papa, Madame Blaché, and Henri (who had certainly earned his cocoa that night!).

  “We’re grateful to you, Madame Blaché, and no mistake,” said Darleen’s father. “You helped save Matchless tonight.”

  “Well, now,” said Madame Blaché modestly. “Let us be glad we were there at the moment of need! And it was Henri and my brave, brave, snake-charming girls who brought down the wicked assassin!”

  Darleen’s Papa looked a little puzzled by the reference to snakes, but he was soon busy pouring out second mugs of coffee and cocoa.

  “So, dear Victorine Berryman,” said Madame Blaché. “I am sorry for all the troubles you have had. I will be hoping that this new chapter of your life will be a happier one. Will you be continuing your new acting career, do you think?”

  “Oh, madame, I think I will, for a while,” said Victorine. She was pale, as you might expect someone to be who had just wrestled a kidnapper to the ground and learned of the destruction of her family home. “And I’ll stick to my stage name, too. Miss Bella Mae Goodwin seems a name much less likely to attract kidnappers or greedy cousins. To be honest, I’m curious to see what kind of life I may be able to build for myself. You know, the way that Crown Princess Dahlia Louise became Daring Darleen, once here she was, in America, and in disguise.”

  Then Victorine actually almost smiled.

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “In the spirit of Daring Darleen, I guess I had better be Bookish Bella Mae!”

  “Brave, Beloved, Bookish Bella Mae!” said Darleen loyally, and then the others around the table added some other likely adjectives beginning with B, and eventually Madame Blaché rose gracefully from her chair and gestured at the clock.

  “It is well past my usual hour for retiring,” she said, “and my poor, dear children must be feeling quite abandoned, with me gone all this long day and with Monsieur Blaché away again on business. So, Henri, I think we should motor on home, as long as you girls are quite settled in here. But first I have two things to say.”

  Everyone had stood up out of politeness when Madame Blaché rose from her chair, and now they hushed like a very interested audience (which, of course, they were). Madame Blaché took Victorine’s hand in both of hers and smiled over in Darleen’s direction too.

  “First of all, my dear, highly valued, sometimes incognita Miss Goodwin! If you ever decide you need someone to serve as a guardian, please do consider me. It would be an honor, truly. And should you find yourself in need of employment in times to come, I would be glad to hire you myself, as a secretary or — well, I suspect you may be capable of a great many things! And finally, if at some point you decide to move on from Fort Lee, I know people in the photoplay business out West, for instance, in Hollywood, in the state of California, who might also be glad to employ you.”

  Victorine said something in French that showed how grateful and overwhelmed she felt, but Darleen’s Papa interrupted with, “No need, no need — she’s always most welcome in the laboratory here.”

  And then Madame Blaché turned her warm eyes in Darleen’s direction.

  “And you, my other snake-charming child. To you I will say, you have definitively proven yourself to be — off the screen as well as on — worthy of your name: our own Daring Darleen!”

  And there was some cheering around that table then. Yes, there was!

  That night, as the girls lay waiting for sleep to catch up with them finally, in Darleen’s cozy little room in the Darlings’ cozy little ramshackle house, the glow of Madame Blaché’s words lingered about them, giving hope to a girl who had just in a single day lost and gained a home.

  “You know, Darleen,” said Victorine, wiping her eyes, “I have been thinking about my old dream, to become a World-Wandering Librarian, and it occurs to me now — now that I know that I really must wander . . .”

  She rolled over to face Da
rleen.

  “It occurs to me that perhaps working in the photoplay business might be at least a little like that. Do you see what I mean?”

  “Perhaps you’d better explain,” said Darleen, who did not see, not yet.

  “It is sharing stories about the world, as a librarian would do — that’s one thing. And then there is the possibility for travel. Not merely in balloons, Darleen! Madame Blaché mentioned California.”

  “Well, that’s true,” said Darleen. “A few of the studios have already moved out there. So far away! But they say there’s no winter to speak of in Hollywood, and of course that makes the filming easier. And you can have an orange tree in your own backyard!”

  They were silent for a while, considering the wonder of oranges growing right there on an ordinary sort of tree.

  “I wonder whether orange trees are good for climbing, though,” said Darleen, and then they both smiled in the dark, because Darleen would always be looking for cliffs and tall trees and other places where that feeling inside her could let loose and fly, and they both knew it.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Victorine a while later. “I think we should work very hard to learn as much as we can about the photoplay business — about every part of it, you know. And then someday, I think — I think perhaps we should go out to California together and see what Hollywood is like.”

  “And have more adventures,” said Darleen, just as a yawn caught her.

  “More adventures!” said Victorine. “Yes, I suppose. For your sake, I’ll hum my way through. I guess we can have as many adventures as we can think of, but this time they won’t be forced on us by wicked kidnappers.”

  “No,” said Darleen. “We’ll make them up ourselves.”

  There was a quiet moment in which the house creaked a little and settled again, like an old dog dreaming of rabbits.

  “Well!” said Victorine. “How interesting and complicated everything turns out to be. I really did think I preferred things to be simple and clear. But then I got kidnapped and met you and lost everything from my old life except Theo, and now I’m Bella Mae during the day and pretending all sorts of things in front of cameras. I’m not sure I can even call myself an onion anymore. But I do still think it matters, the truthfulness of things. You will tell me, won’t you, when I get too far from being an onion.”