Flappers & Fiction

Mrs. Garland hesitated to leave the children alone, knowing well how easily her daughter Sue could lose herself in a storybook. Her fears were quite justified, it seems. While Sue frets over the fictional woes of Lady Marion, her four-year-old brother decides to set off on a winter journey of his own. The silence in the kitchen is broken only when Sue realizes the little blue coat is missing. Panic sends her running toward the valley, where a tiny figure is already stepping onto the high railroad trestle just as the train whistle begins to scream.

Monsieur Ker jolts awake to a French officer’s warning about North Africa’s worst precipice, and within seconds his train is lurching over a black abyss above Constantine, the city the Arabs call “the City in the Air.” Ker has crossed strange railways on four continents, but this outlawed crag, severed from the earth by a chasm where Jugurtha once held Rome at bay for six years, asks something of its visitors that guides cannot prepare them for.

At Stephenson, two hundred and sixty miles from Memphis, a passenger collapses with yellow fever. Armed men at the station threaten to shoot anyone who lands the dying man. The passengers abandon him in an empty car and the train flies on. This is not the whole story. It is merely how the narrator arrives, eventually, at a mountain church where a lean preacher scolds him for taking notes during a sermon about a dead woman’s cooking.

Young Harry Fenton arrives in the heat of a Burmese port with a head full of romantic notions about the gentle wisdom of nature. Under the guidance of the cynical Captain Weatherly, he marvels at the dockyard elephants piling timber with the precision of hired laborers. Harry is charmed by their apparent cleverness; he believes a few sugar-cakes have secured him a loyal friend. But when he returns empty-handed one afternoon, he discovers that a beast’s memory is sharp, but its gratitude is dangerously short-lived.

Sixty Italian soldiers are trapped in a farmhouse, ammunition dwindling as the Austrians close in. Their only hope lies in a scrap of paper and the legs of a fourteen-year-old Sardinian drummer boy. The Captain, a man of iron discipline, watches from the garret as the boy dashes across the sun-gilded wheat fields, stumbling under fire yet refusing to stop. But it is only later, amidst the quiet agony of a field hospital, that the Captain discovers the terrible price of that run; he finally learns the true definition of courage.

Professor Pundit has traveled the length of the Lower Niger for one specimen, the Yauri crocodile, a beast said to carry a jaw unlike anything else in Western Africa. Every attempt has failed him. So he sends for Gezo, the most feared hunter in the district, who arrives looking rather too slight to cast a proper shadow in the noonday sun. What Gezo does next, armed with nothing but a roll of ox-hide and a knife, is not for the faint of heart.