by Anne Nesbet
“Not to mention snakes,” said Darleen, and then she suddenly had a plan of her own. “But Victorine, hush. Don’t you be silly. You can’t go out West where you don’t know a soul and when you haven’t even had any sleep yet today. Not to mention not much to eat. I know where I can hide you, but we have to be even sneakier now than we were before, because I don’t know where Jasper Lukes and that awful man have gotten to, and they mustn’t catch even the slightest glimpse of us.”
So they sneaked very sneakily indeed from house to house and tree to tree, until they were across the street from a building that was half glass cliffs and half ordinary wood and brick. This was Matchless Photoplay.
“Isn’t that beautiful!” said Victorine (looking at the glass).
“If Papa’s not at home, and he’s not at Aunt Shirley’s, he is absolutely for certain here, in his laboratory,” said Darleen. “And Matchless is the perfect place to hide you too.”
But spiders, spiders, everywhere!
Darleen hesitated for a moment, wondering where the spiders were hiding in this picture, and it’s a good thing she did, because a second later, human-shaped shadows flickered across the low windows of the laboratory.
Someone was in there. At least two someones, and the shadowy profile of one of them very much resembled Jasper Lukes.
Oh, Papa! thought Darleen.
She had to get in there right away to help her Papa, but she couldn’t risk letting the villains get a glimpse of Victorine.
“Quick! Around the other side,” she said to Victorine, and they got themselves out of view and to the opposite corner of Matchless, where the amazing glass-covered studio backed right up against a more ordinary two-story building. And next to the ordinary, nonglass part of the building grew a wonderful old tree, probably quite surprised by the sorts of things all those quick-living two-footed creatures had been getting up to around its feet over the last few years. To think that only a blink ago, in tree time, all of this busy place had been farmland, quiet and calm!
Darleen knew this oak very well. They were, you might say, old and secret friends. Her Papa had never directly told her not to climb trees, after all, and the trunk of an old oak is surely as solid as any patch of ground.
“The dressing rooms are right up there,” said Darleen. “Will you mind very much, having to climb a tree? It’s perfectly safe.”
Victorine looked at the tree. Her eyes grew wide.
“I guess I can try,” she said. “But I don’t know how to —”
“Quick, quick!” said Darleen. “I’ll give you a boost up to that first branch. Like getting on a horse, I guess. Then it’s as easy as the back stairs from there. Here —”
And with her hands she made a step for Victorine’s foot. “Up you go!” she said.
“Like mounting a horse,” said Victorine in the stern tones of someone telling herself an impossible thing is actually completely possible after all, and she clenched her jaw and began to hum, and two minutes later she had successfully hauled herself up onto that great lower branch and was already reaching for the next.
Darleen didn’t need a boost, of course. She knew every barky wrinkle of this tree’s old trunk by heart, and before you could say Jack Robinson, she had passed by Victorine and was already a few branches above. Her heart had only time enough for one wild and joyful twitch, and then she was already reaching out to open the second-story window and slipping right through it, into the studio building’s upstairs hall.
Victorine’s humming grew louder as she climbed.
“Almost there,” said Darleen, leaning out to give the novice tree climber some encouragement. “Take my hand!”
When Victorine finally scrambled through that open window, Dar said “Hush” again, first thing, and led Victorine on speedy tiptoe down the hall to the simplest of a series of simple doors, those of the storerooms and dressing rooms that were squashed under the roof up here.
“You can hide out here,” said Dar, mouthing the words more than speaking them. “That’s my dressing room. I’ll be right back. I’ve got to go down to the laboratory to see what’s going on with my Papa.”
The laboratory was in another part of Matchless entirely, on the far side of the glassed-in studios. The whole effect was very higgledy-piggledy, one building suddenly tacked on to the next. But the builders did try to keep the most flammable part of the operation relatively far from the little rooms up here.
“Coming with you,” said Victorine, also with barely a sound.
“Careful,” said Darleen, more through gestures than actual words, and then, on second thought, she put her finger to her mouth to warn: No humming.
At that moment, there was a strange set of sounds from somewhere below them: a shout, a crash, and something that might have been a door banging shut.
Darleen was already racing down the stairs. Inside, her mind was saying something like Oh, no! Oh, no! Oh, no! Nothing more coherent than that.
There were no more shouts or crashes assaulting her ears, but as she opened the door of the great laboratory room, where they put the film through its chemical baths and made the pictures come out into the world, she heard something worse than a crash. It was a moan.
She came running around a worktable, and there lay a figure, sprawled on the floor.
“Oh, no!” she said aloud now, even before she was close enough to see for sure who it was.
Sometimes our heart sees many feet ahead of our eyes. It does happen. Darleen’s heart looked ahead and contracted with pain and distress.
“Oh, no!” she said again, as she flung herself down by the body on the floor. “Oh, Papa!”
A half second later, Victorine had her fingers resting gently on his wrist. “How dreadful! Poor man! He’s breathing, but his pulse is awfully quick.”
“Papa!” said Darleen. It was so horrible, seeing her strong, quiet Papa collapsed on the floor this way.
“Look, he’s opening his eyes! I’ll go for help.”
Dar looked up at Victorine, and her head was swimming in the murky places a bad shock will heave us into. For a moment she couldn’t think clearly at all. Then she said, “No, you’d better stay here with him, Victorine. We can’t let them see you. I’ll run back to Aunt Shirley’s place and get help. It will only take a moment. Oh, Victorine, don’t let anything more happen to Papa. And maybe don’t tell him we were just climbing a tree.”
“Go now,” said Victorine. “Run fast! I’ll take good care of him. And when I hear you coming back, I’ll just float away upstairs, and no one will see me at all. Oh, Darleen, go!”
So Darleen went, fast as the wind (if the wind were a twelve-year-old girl with fear in her heart and with quick, trembling feet), right back up the street again. That was the start of a bad half hour that was all running and stammering and watching her aunt’s face flush with alarm and seeing an uncle (Charlie) sent off to call the local doctor, and then a breathless swift trek back to the Matchless laboratory.
They found Darleen’s father still lying on the ground, but with his head more comfortably cushioned on a soft wrap. And most important of all, his eyes blinked in recognition as Aunt Shirley and Darleen rushed toward him.
A sob of relief escaped Darleen’s throat. She had thought . . . she had thought . . .
“Now, now,” said her Papa, squeezing Darleen’s hand. “Don’t worry so. Look, Darleeny, I’m quite all right. I could sit right up, you know.”
“No, don’t!” said Aunt Shirley and Darleen, both at once.
“Not until Dr. Jones takes a look at you, Bill,” Aunt Shirley added.
“That’s what the angel kept saying,” said Darleen’s father, and Darleen and Aunt Shirley both fell immediately silent, though for very different reasons. “‘Not until help comes,’ she kept saying, and she had the sweetest hum, just like an angel should have. ‘Stay calm, stay calm,’ she said, ‘and help will be here in a moment, surely.’”
“Oh, Bill,” said Aunt Shirley, almost tenderly
, which was not her general mode. “You really have been hit on the head.”
“As if I didn’t know it! Ruffians in the laboratory, pawing at the reels.”
“Papa!” said Darleen. “Was it Jasper Lukes?”
“Jasper Lukes? Well, I didn’t exactly see — they had scarves wrapped around their faces, so I didn’t get a good look at them. But why would Jasper do such a thing? No, a couple of scoundrels, I guess.”
“Two scoundrels, and one of them Jasper Lukes,” said Darleen.
“Hush, really, Darleen,” said Aunt Shirley. “That’s enough. But then what happened, Bill?”
“Their voices were all muffled,” said Papa, pausing to cough a little. “Because of the scarves, you know. But one of them kept talking about the Strand, wanting Dan’s reels. When I told him to leave, he just up and whacked me, and out I went.”
“How awful,” said Aunt Shirley. “What were you doing in here all alone?”
“Fretting about our Darleen, I was. She hadn’t come home, and there was that stuff in the paper about the other kidnapping and nothing about ours, and I didn’t know what to think. Thought I’d develop a test strip from the reel Dan filmed at the Strand, you know, so I could get a little glimpse of my girl. I thought it would be comforting. Had it drying on the wall when that bandit surprised me. Those thieves will have pinched the rest of the reel, I guess. Is that really you, Darleen? All safe and sound?”
“It is me, poor Papa!” said Darleen, her heart very full.
“Shiny as a new penny and perfectly fine,” added Aunt Shirley. “So you see how foolish it was of you to be fretting that way.”
“Yes, but —” said Darleen, but then she stopped short. When Aunt Shirley pinched your arm that hard, speaking became difficult.
“Dear child. The angel said you were fine,” said Darleen’s father. “And look, she was right. Here you are and . . . and . . .”
His voice was beginning to grow faint. Aunt Shirley put her practical hand very gently on her brother’s shoulder.
“Now, Bill, do be sensible and save your strength,” she said. “The doctor will be here any second, and then we’ll take you home to my place, I think, where I can be sure you’re being properly looked after. Don’t you worry yourself about the missing reel. It’s not as important as your head! Oh, and here’s the doctor now!”
It was a relief, really, to have Aunt Shirley there and taking charge as Aunt Shirley so liked to do. It was a relief, too, when good old Dr. Jones examined Darleen’s Papa and declared that his neck wasn’t broken and his skull was still in good shape, and that, with a couple of quiet days of good nursing and rest, he should be back to full strength.
Aunt Shirley and Darleen hugged each other, they were so glad, and the uncles fitted up an impromptu stretcher and carried Darleen’s father down the street to Aunt Shirley’s house. “I’m going to nurse him properly, so I guess the studio will have to do without the both of us for a few days,” said Aunt Shirley, and the dark tone in her voice suggested she wasn’t entirely confident that Matchless would be able to manage. But it couldn’t be helped. Darleen was given the task of fetching supplies from her house for her father and then was told it would be better, after all, if she didn’t mind sleeping in her own bed at home.
“Unless it’s too lonely there,” said Aunt Shirley. “We could put you on the sofa here, I suppose, but I want you to get some actual sleep.”
“Oh, no!” said Darleen quickly. “I’ll be fine on my own, really!”
She did not speak aloud the rest of her thoughts on the subject, though, which included some worry that Aunt Shirley might want to ask her questions that would be very awkward, as far as Darleen could figure, to answer, such as:
— What exactly happened to you last night?
— Where do you think that Berryman girl might be?
— Why do you keep saying those quite peculiar things about Jasper Lukes, anyway?
I’ll have to figure out a plan, as soon as I have a moment to catch my breath, Darleen told herself over and over as she lugged a box of clothes for her Papa from her house to Aunt Shirley’s (keeping her eyes peeled for any lurking spiders). I’ll make this all right, somehow. I will.
And Darleen repeated that promise to herself — I’ll make this all right, somehow. I will — as she pocketed bread from Aunt Shirley’s pantry, filched a piece of cold chicken from the kitchen to share with Victorine later, and clambered back up her friendly tree. She considered smuggling Victorine back to her actual house, but there were the spiders to worry about. And at least in a photoplay studio, there are always extras around and about, so at Matchless, Victorine could hide in plain sight.
As Darleen came up the stairs to the floor where the little dressing rooms and supply rooms were lined up like broom closets, she suddenly felt tired to her very core. So when she opened the door of her dressing room, at first she hardly recognized the space. Victorine had been at work while she was gone, heaping up whatever blankets and soft coats she could find to make a most comfortable little nest for people who had been cheated of sleep by adventure and mishap.
Victorine herself was curled up in that nest, below the mess of old photos tacked to the wall. In one, the members of the old Darling theater company (before their moving-picture days) were lined up like schoolchildren on risers. All those strange but familiar faces! There is something mysterious about old photographs, the way they promise to tell you secret truths about the people they capture. But they don’t always exactly keep that promise, do they? Darleen knew that from experience: stare at any picture long enough, and the souls in it, instead of coming into focus, begin to waver and fade farther away. Her mother’s sad eyes, for example, in the old photograph at home. What were those eyes trying to say? And what secrets were hiding in the photograph here? Darleen never knew quite what to make of that infant Jasper Lukes, looking deceptively angelic at the end of the second row as he dozed in the arms of his mother, or, next to them, Jasper’s no-good father, who seemed to have turned his head away right when the camera was taking the picture.
As soon as Darleen came through the door, Victorine jumped up, all worry and concern.
“How is your Papa doing? What did the doctor say? He’s such a sweet man, your father! I can’t believe someone was wicked enough to strike him down.”
Darleen rattled through everything she could think of: what Aunt Shirley had said, what the doctor had said, how her Papa would be staying at Shirley’s house for a little while for the sake of the nursing. And then she remembered the funniest part of that not very funny adventure:
“And, oh, Victorine, imagine: Papa kept saying you were an angel! I think Aunt Shirley was about ready to faint when he said that. She thought, you know, that he must be awfully close to the heavenly gates if he was seeing angels.”
They both laughed a little at that, the rueful kind of laughter that is mostly relief that something worse didn’t happen.
“One more thing, Darleen,” said Victorine. “Your Uncle Dan is the one who takes the moving pictures, is that right? The cameraman? Well, those villains were after the pictures he took. The pictures from the Strand. That’s what your Papa told me, poor man.”
“Because they were pictures of them!” said Darleen. The light was going on in her mind.
“Evidence, then,” said Victorine. “Like in the Sherlock Holmes stories. And now it’s gone.”
“I don’t think so!” said Darleen. “Papa developed a test strip — he said so himself — and hung it up to dry.” She clapped her palms together. “Victorine, let’s go see.”
Victorine was already on her feet, ready to go. So Darleen led the way back down the stairs and through the door separating the laboratory building from the rest of the studio, the door with the warning posted on it. Darleen gave the sign a friendly tap as they passed by:
REMEMBER!
MATCHES, CIGARETTES, CIGARS,
AND
FIRE OF ANY KIND:
FORBI
DDEN ALWAYS!
LET’S STAY SAFE AND STAY ALIVE.
“I forgot to warn you not to smoke your pipe or cigars!” she said to Victorine, who laughed.
“Not too much danger of that,” said Victorine. “And I’ve read about fires in the picture theaters. It’s a danger, isn’t it?”
Darleen nodded.
“Photoplay studios are an awful lot like the Scarecrow in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Not afraid of anything but a lighted match, I mean.”
“For good reason,” said Victorine.
“For very good reason,” agreed Darleen. “A few weeks ago, there was an awful fire that burned the laboratory over at the Eclair studios. My family’s always been frightened about fire, at least since that old theater of ours burned down all those years ago. And there’s so much that’s flammable at a photoplay studio: the celluloid that the film is printed on, the wood everywhere, not to mention all the chemicals they use.”
In fact, the smell of the chemicals in here was enough to make a person’s eyes water. Darleen had been raised to admire the tough lungs of the laboratory workers — like her Papa, who claimed not to be bothered by any of it, even though Darleen could hear him coughing sometimes in the middle of the night.
“Hey, now, Darleeny. Don’t you worry. Pickles last longer than cukes,” he liked to say about that. He figured he had been brining in photoplay chemicals for years now.
A person like Victorine probably had delicate and tender lungs, though, thought Darleen, the kind that weren’t used to bad air and chemicals. She would surely be wanting to get out of this room as fast as possible. But when Darleen turned around to look at Victorine, she caught her spinning around slowly, taking in all the interesting chaos of the laboratory: all the equipment, the vats of chemicals, and the long strips of celluloid film that were draped along the walls to dry. She did not look like someone desperate for cleaner air.
“What a wonderful place,” said Victorine, and Darleen couldn’t help but smile. “You can certainly see how much work goes into making a photoplay.”
“All kinds of work,” said Darleen. “Papa does the chemical developing and some of the editing and all sorts of things. Everybody knows more than one thing around here, I guess. Why, Uncle Charlie, years back, had a job in the lab as a perforator! Do you know what a perforator used to do?”