by Anne Nesbet
Dar and Victorine exchanged a worried look and backed away a few more steps.
“There it is,” said Victorine grimly. “The ‘massive search.’ So they can send me back to the dreadful Brownstones.”
They stole more glimpses of the setup at the ferry entrance: the gate the passengers went through, and the larger maw that the vehicles used, and that daunting policeman with his nightstick positioned between the two.
“He’s like the Cyclops guarding his cave!” said Victorine. “From Homer, you know.”
Darleen nodded. In fact, she did know: she had seen the photoplay of Homer’s Odyssey that had come over from Italy a couple of years ago. The Cyclops was a cruel, one-eyed giant who had eaten some of Odysseus’s poor sailors when he had them all trapped in that cave. He had been filmed so well! On the screen he had been twice the size of those sailors, and so fierce!
But then that gave her an idea.
She pulled Victorine away from the police officer, over to the far side of the motorcars and the carriages.
“Victorine,” she said. “Do you remember how Odysseus escaped that Cyclops?”
“I certainly do!” said Victorine. “But Darleen, are you suggesting we sharpen a stake and throw it at that man’s eye?”
“No, no, I didn’t mean the stake,” said Dar. “I meant the sheep.”
And she tipped her head a little, as a way of pointing without pointing at the motorcars.
Victorine considered the motorcars, looked back at Dar, and smiled so brightly that Darleen could see she had understood. In the old story of the Odyssey — and in the more recent photoplay — that wily hero Odysseus had blinded the giant Cyclops and then tied his men (the ones the Cyclops hadn’t yet eaten — poor fellows!) underneath the giant’s sheep, and the sheep had carried the men safely out of the cave. In a twentieth-century city, there might not be so very many sheep wandering about. But there were motorcars!
“It will be fearsomely muddy under these ‘sheep.’”
“No, no,” said Dar. “We don’t need to get under the cars. We’ll just hop onto the runners on the sides, you know. And cling to the doors.”
“Like you did in that episode with the pearl thief!” said Victorine. “When you jumped from car to car! Goodness! That was exciting! You must have been going about a hundred miles an hour. So very brave!”
“Well, actually,” said Dar, “the motorcars weren’t going fast at all. The cameraman just cranked slowly, so that it would look speedy later when the projectionist — Oh, never mind, I’ll explain some other time. They’re about to push the cars onto the ferry.”
“Push?”
“Yes; they can’t use the engines or the horses will take fright. Here we go! Let’s grab ourselves a motorcar — a nice big one — and keep out of view.”
They had to keep out of everybody’s sight, of course. But, by some miracle, the only person who spotted anything strange was one of the ferry workers who was pushing the cars onto the boat.
“Hey, now,” he said to Darleen. But thank goodness it was Darleen he noticed! She had been on that ferry often enough that he knew who she was. Why, she had even signed his daughter’s autograph album once upon a time.
She smiled at him, trying to make her smile as confident as possible, and put a finger to her lips. The ferry worker looked around a little, probably half wondering where the movie camera might be hidden. She could practically see him thinking, Oh, these photoplay people! Always up to something!
But then he smiled back and shrugged, and the motorcar-sheep rolled into the belly of the ferry, with the girls safely clinging to its not-very-woolly side.
Once the car stopped, they stayed low for a while, until they felt the ferry churning its way out into the river and heard the driver get out of his motorcar and stride away. Then they squeezed past the other motorcars and climbed up the stairs to the passenger deck. It smelled of smoke and dampness up there — and worse.
“Spitting is such a vulgar habit!” said Victorine, shaking her head at the stinking cuspidor.
“Hush,” said Darleen, and she hurried Victorine forward into the fresh air at the bow.
Even in damp weather, on the ferry it was better to be outside than in. A small family was hovering by the rail, lovingly braving the wind so that their tiny toddler could point from his nursemaid’s arms, as toddlers like to do, out across the waves. The elegant mother held a round wicker picnic basket, and a little girl clung close, picking idly at the latch of the basket as she smiled up into the face of her mother.
A pang leaped up like a spark of electricity right inside Darleen’s heart: a girl smiling up at her mother! Oh, there are sorrows that never quite heal, no matter how long ago the loss. But then Dar thought of her new friend, who had lost her Grandmama so very recently, and her heart straightened up and became unselfish. Poor Victorine!
Then a lovely thing happened: the moment Dar reached out for Victorine’s hand to give it a comforting squeeze, she discovered that Victorine had already stretched a hand out to her. The hands found each other in midair; the two girls glanced at each other, saw the sympathy mirrored in each other’s eyes, and almost laughed aloud right there on that windy deck.
Because, to be sure, even though they were two motherless and grandmotherless girls, it was still glorious to be speeding across the river toward the green cliffs of New Jersey. Somewhere out there, behind the clouds, the sun was up now. The morning had begun. It wasn’t even actually raining just at the moment, merely drizzling. They had escaped from the evil kidnappers. And they were really, truly on the move, as if the great projectionist in the sky had suddenly started cranking the film forward, just a little faster than normal, so that the wind felt extra-exciting and the water swirled by extra-fast and their hearts beat a bit faster, too.
And then the little girl by the railing gave a cry of alarm and jumped back to hide behind her mother’s skirts. Her fingers must have accidentally undone the latch of the picnic basket, because the lid of the basket was rising now . . .
And, oh! What sort of picnic was this?
Black coils were spilling up and over the edge of the basket and now half reaching, now half tumbling toward the deck of the ferry.
In that basket was not a picnic but a snake!
Oh!” said several people at once as four feet or more of snake hit the damp deck of the ferry. (The nursemaid said a lot more than “Oh!” but it was impossible to make out the exact words. Fear, thought Darleen, must be making her babble.)
“Darleen, quick!” said Victorine. “Oh, quick, quick! Like that rattlesnake in Episode Three!”
But that rattlesnake had been stuffed — a mere prop of a rattlesnake! And then they had pasted in a shot of a real snake in close-up so that the audience would think that the toy had been real.
It turns out that a stuffed snake is very unlike a real snake in certain respects.
A stuffed snake, for instance, will not usually slither across the deck of a ferryboat. It will not render nearly speechless a small crowd of human beings who had just moments before been happily smiling at the Hudson River.
Moreover, in Episode Three, Daring Darleen had used a broom against the threat of the (stuffed) rattlesnake, but here there was no broom.
Nor was there much hope of help from the other people on the deck; the mother was busy trying to calm the little girl, and neither nursemaid nor toddler seemed likely to be of any help in catching a snake when they could hardly even catch their breath!
No broom, no bucket, no zookeeper nearby. Darleen and Victorine looked at each other again in alarm. They would have to handle this snake themselves.
“I’m sure you must know quite a lot about snakes,” said Victorine, “since you’ve filmed with them before.”
“Well,” said Darleen with some reluctance. Snakes, it turned out, were different from cliffs: no wild thrill blossomed in Darleen’s chest when she looked at those mysterious coils. Instead, she was wondering how to go about shooin
g a snake (that wasn’t stuffed) back into a basket.
I don’t have to be brave, she told herself. I am acting a part.
“There you go,” she said to the snake as she shuffled her feet on the deck behind it to encourage it to move along back the other way, toward the basket. “Go on, go on!”
The snake was now a dark scrawl against the pale boards of the ferry deck, like a message in some ancient language written all in loops and curls. It raised its head in what Dar thought was probably annoyance and shook the end of its tail a little, as if it, too, were playing a role, and in its case the role was Rattlesnake. But it produced hardly a whisper’s worth of noise (its tail had no actual rattle), and it was so very blue-black.
“Oh, my!” said Victorine. “Look at that! Now it’s flattening its head at you, Darleen! Well, goodness, the poor thing. I guess perhaps we’d better pick it right up.”
And without even seeming to do anything much at all, Victorine got herself behind the snake’s range of view and, slipping her hands in low and from the side, gently lifted that snake right up from the deck.
Darleen took a quick breath and followed Victorine’s lead, because it did seem too long a creature to rest on only one pair of hands. The snake was heavier than she had expected, and those coils were smooth and cold and strange to the touch. Darleen had assumed the snake might feel sort of limp in her hands, like an enormous earthworm, but in fact it turned out to be a very muscular creature.
“Nicely done. Now don’t squeeze it,” said Victorine quietly. “Grandmama did always say the main thing about snakes was to stay calm and come in from the side. We want it to feel utterly unworried as we move it back to its basket home.”
Darleen managed not to squeeze her half of the snake, and she didn’t drop it either.
They took easy, easy steps together across the deck, Victorine keeping the snake’s head well away from her own.
Darleen could hear her humming very slightly under her breath. But fortunately the transfer time was not terribly long. The elegant woman carefully opened the basket, and a half second later, they shifted the poor snake back into its home, and the woman shut and latched the lid so that the basket sat innocently on the deck, pretending not to have anything dangerous hidden in it at all. The children (and the nursemaid) were gaping at Dar and Victorine.
The elegant, small woman did not seem like someone who would ever do something as inelegant as gape, but she was certainly smiling, and her dark eyes were full of amusement.
“Bravo, les filles!” she said, clapping her gloved hands together.
She had quite a lovely accent.
While Darleen kept a wary eye on the latch of the picnic basket, the elegant woman and Victorine fell into a conversation, using words that weren’t English at all, but French.
Darleen knew they were speaking French because the movies had been born — nearly twenty years ago! — in two places almost at once — France and New Jersey — and that meant that nowadays, there were quite a few people working in Fort Lee who had come all the way across the ocean from France.
But recognizing that people are probably speaking French is not the same thing as understanding a single word of what they’re saying!
Sure enough, one moment later, the elegant woman was already turning midsentence to Darleen to say what was almost certainly a question.
Everyone fell silent and looked at Darleen, who blinked.
Playing a role! she told herself sternly, and she tried to stand taller and to look more like, say, Crown Princess Dahlia Louise. But her words came out of her mouth sounding much more like Darleen than like Crown Princess Dahlia Louise:
“Pardon me?” she said. “Sorry. I don’t understand.”
“Ah, excuse me, please!” said the elegant woman. “I made the assumption, since your friend speaks such very lovely French, that so must you also. I do apologize. Thank you so much for helping us with our serpent. But I am forgetting all of my manners. May I ask who you are, my brave snake-conquering girls?”
Dar and Victorine looked at each other in sudden alarm. The elegant woman seemed a kind enough sort of person, but they couldn’t risk revealing Victorine’s identity to anyone who might go on to reveal it to a cop. And Victorine herself was probably the one most tempted to betray her secrets, with her inconvenient vow to always tell the truth.
Darleen tried to make her eyes say quiet, quiet, quiet, don’t you dare tell her your name! to Victorine, and Victorine clamped her mouth shut and looked like someone wrestling with inner demons.
In the middle of their silent alarm, the woman laughed.
“Never mind, never mind, I see,” she said, and a playful sort of fire flickered in her dark eyes. She leaned forward as if sharing a confidence. “Even I, dear girls, enjoy an occasional outing incognita. Moreover —”
And then they were saved by the bell, as Uncle Charlie, who sometimes went to boxing matches in his spare time, liked to say. When a boxing match is going badly, sometimes the bell that ends a round will ring just at the right moment and spare the poor loser from being too terribly pounded.
In this particular case, the bell was a whistle: a ferryboat whistle.
They were already close to the other side of the Hudson River, and the ferry was shrilly announcing that it was almost time to disembark.
The French-speaking family bustled about, getting themselves together and picking up the wicker basket filled with snake.
As the elegant woman shuttled her children and the nursemaid toward the exit, she turned around and smiled once more in the direction of Victorine and Dar.
“I must say, Mademoiselle Daring Darleen, that you were particularly good in the serial last night at the Strand. I admire a girl who can dangle with so much expression from a cliff! This little snake you have rescued is also an actor in the photoplays — but not, I think, as skilled as you.”
And then she was gone.
Darleen and Victorine stayed on the deck for a moment, just staring at each other in shared relief and surprise.
“Oh, goodness, she recognized me!” said Darleen.
“Well, of course,” said Victorine. “You are terribly famous.”
“But she had just asked who we were, hadn’t she?”
“That was sheer politeness,” said Victorine. “Thank goodness I’m not famous — well, not as far as my face goes — so she couldn’t recognize me. Imagine if she had kept asking who I was! Even staying silent felt like edging quite close to a falsehood.”
“I think you did a beautiful job staying silent,” said Darleen firmly. “I wonder who she was, though. She must have been fetching that snake for a studio, since she said it was an actor too. Perhaps she’s married to a properties man at one of the studios. There are quite a few photoplay people from France, you know, working around here. I’m sure Aunt Shirley would have known who she was right away. Sometimes I think Aunt Shirley knows every person at every studio anywhere around here.”
They were following the Sunday crowd off the ferry now.
“So this is the town of Fort Lee?” said Victorine, looking around.
“Oh, goodness, no,” said Darleen. “This is just good old Edgewater, where the ferry stops. We’ll have to take a trolley up the hill to Fort Lee. Over there.”
Darleen pointed to the place where the streetcar stopped.
“Oh, and Victorine, wherever did you learn to be so brave about snakes?” asked Darleen as they hurried across the street.
“Brave!” said Victorine. “Oh, my, no. I assure you I’m actually irrationally terrified of snakes!”
“Are you sure?” said Darleen. “You seemed so calm.”
“Well, you know,” said Victorine, “fear is such an interesting thing! My dear Grandmama called it ‘an instinct meant to save us,’ but then, she did like to add that when our rational brains are telling us one thing, and irrational fear is shouting something else, it is usually best to listen to the quieter voice of reason. And in this particular c
ase, I knew — my rational brain knew — that the snake was actually harmless, although I certainly didn’t feel that way in my spirit.”
“Harmless?” said Darleen with a shudder. “But Victorine, how could you be sure?”
“Because it was an eastern indigo snake,” said Victorine. “And that is a nonvenomous species and no danger at all. Of course, it has teeth, but from what I’ve read, it bites humans only very rarely.”
Now Darleen was gaping.
“How do you know all that about snakes?” she said.
“Grandmama was very intent that I should have a well-rounded education,” said Victorine, her voice quite sad. “And she did especially love all of the natural sciences. When one travels the world, it is useful to know something of the natural sciences. If you are in Turkey, and a bug the size of your hand is hanging on a tree in front of you and making quite a riotous noise, it is immensely helpful to be able to think, Ah, a cicada, instead of flinching, you know. At such a moment, a good scientific education is a boon.”
“I guess it might be,” said Darleen politely. Aunt Shirley had taught her some arithmetic, but all she knew about insects was which ones to swat. “Your grandma was interested in bugs and snakes?”
“Very interested, oh, yes,” said Victorine. “We traveled the world to perfect her collection. It was such a disappointment to her that I persisted so stubbornly in being afraid of snakes, despite all of her training.”
Darleen put her arm around poor Victorine.
“Well, don’t be sad now!” she said. “Your grandma would have been awfully proud of you today, the way you handled that thing, that —”
“Eastern indigo,” said Victorine. “Drymarchon couperi.”
Darleen shuddered.
“That . . . ugh,” she said. “And here’s the streetcar coming right —”
Before she could say now, Victorine made a surprised sound and pulled Dar back into the shadows of the nearest building.
“Look there!” she whispered into Darleen’s ear. “Look at those two! Aren’t they — Oh, they are!”