Spin

by Peter Zheutlin

  Along the docks many fisherman sat mending nets and tending to their boats, and I tried desperately, frantically in English, to explain my predicament, hoping to find one adventurous and brave enough to take me back to Port Said. I struck most of them, judging by the expressions on their faces, as a slightly daft, excitable foreigner trying in vain to make myself understood. Knowing glances were exchanged among them, glances that made it clear they took me not at all seriously; jokes made in an Arabic dialect were, I surmised, being made at my expense.

  I had just about given up hope of making it back to Port Said in time when an elegant, well-dressed gentleman approached me, having seen from a distance what must have seemed the comical sight of a woman, increasingly panicked, try to make sense to a gaggle of rough-hewn, dark-skinned fishermen who could make neither head nor tail of her pleadings.

  “Good day, madam,” he said. His accent was strongly and properly British. “You seem to be in a state of considerable distress. May I help you?” He extended a hand. “My name is Winchester. Bradley Winchester.”

  “Oh, thank goodness,” I replied, and then breathlessly spilled out the details of my predicament. “Can you be of any help to me, Mr. Winchester? My name, by the way, is Miss Londonderry, Annie Londonderry, from America.”

  “The Miss Londonderry?” he asked. “The famous globe-girdler? I have read of your adventures in the papers. But I certainly never expected to make your acquaintance, especially not here.”

  “Nor did I expect to find myself stuck here with my bicycle nearly two hundred miles away aboard a ship, the Sydney, that is likely to depart Port Said without me unless I can figure out a way to get back in the next fourteen hours,” I replied. “I was hoping one of these fishermen would take me, but I cannot make myself understood.”

  “Well, Miss Londonderry, good fortune is shining upon you today. You see, I am here on business of the Crown. I work in the Foreign Office on maritime affairs, and as your luck would have it, I am about to sail for Port Said myself aboard the HMS Balfleur.” Mr. Winchester pointed behind me to a large and fleet fighting ship, larger than the Sydney, docked in the distance.

  “If you had persuaded one of these ruffians to take his life in his hands to take you to Port Said, you’d either have drowned or missed your ship by several days,” said Mr. Winchester. “Neither they nor their boats are equipped for such a journey. The Balfleur sails in an hour and will take but nine hours en route. You will be back with a few hours to spare. If you accept my invitation to be my guest, that is. She’s a magnificent ship, Miss Londonderry, put into Her Majesty’s service just seven months ago. Please, rest assured. We will have you on board the Sydney in plenty of time to continue your voyage.”

  Needless to say, this was an enormous stroke of luck, perhaps the only chance I had to make it back to Port Said in time, and if I had failed, my entire venture might well have gone up in smoke. I gladly accepted Mr. Winchester’s offer.

  “May I carry that package for you, Miss Londonderry?”

  He was referring to the box that contained some two dozen images of the holy city that I had purchased from a vendor there. Glass lantern slides were sold like postcards back in those days.

  “Thank you, Mr. Winchester, but I am, as you would imagine, used to being quite self-reliant. It’s a small burden and I can carry them myself, thank you.”

  Mr. Winchester seemed a bit put off by this. He was, after all, a very proper British gentleman and was no doubt surprised that I did not accept his offer to carry the package. It was an affront to his British sensibilities.

  “As you wish, Miss Londonderry,” he said.

  Given that my passage on the Balfleur owed itself entirely to the graciousness of Mr. Winchester, I knew I would be beholden to him for the next nine hours or so, and he proved himself to be both a bit of a dilettante and a minor nuisance, for he refused throughout the voyage to give me any privacy or to allow his prattling to subside. But being “saved” by Mr. Winchester drove home something of which I was generally aware, but that really came into focus as we walked toward the Balfleur: a trip like this depends very much on the kindness of strangers and the goodwill of most people, for here I was alone and working without a safety net. Who could I call on in times of trouble? No one but strangers who might or might not even speak the same language. I suppose when one undertakes a journey such as this it is a declaration of faith in one’s fellow man (or woman).

  After we had boarded the ship, Mr. Winchester invited me (and I could not refuse, of course) to sit with him on the deck. It was a warm, sunny day, and the view from the bow of the Balfleur was quite magnificent. The sea was an azure blue. A light breeze was blowing on shore.

  “You know, Miss Londonderry, I have been aware of your venture for many months now,” said Mr. Winchester, at the beginning of what proved to be a rather lengthy monologue. “I am an avid wheelman myself, and I chanced to be in New York on business last July when you arrived there from Boston. I saw many articles in the newspapers about you. I must admit that I would have put the chances of your making it all this way to Jaffa at nil. It sounded as if you had done little to prepare for such a journey.”

  “That is indeed so, Mr. Winchester,” I answered. “But I have found that most men find it very easy to underestimate a determined woman.”

  I would have been happy to leave the conversation at that, but it quickly became clear that silence was not among Mr. Winchester’s virtues. The interrogation, it seemed, was destined to last as long as it took the Balfleur to reach Port Said.

  “And do I recall correctly that your name is assumed, that you are married with children, and that you are allegedly traveling on a wager?”

  This, I have to say, took me by surprise. I had been annoyed when the New York World published an item during my stay in New York with these details, details I would have preferred to keep out of the newspapers, which I did with success for most of my journey.

  “You have a keen memory, Mr. Winchester. Yes, those details were published in New York.” I was eager to drop the subject.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, Miss Londonderry, what does your husband think about this jaunt of yours?”

  I did mind, but I owed my presence on this ship to Mr. Winchester and I was obliged to talk much while saying as little as possible.

  “I can assure you, Mr. Winchester, that I would not have embarked on such a journey without his support and understanding.” This, of course, was false, but it was the answer least likely to take the conversation in unpleasant directions.

  As I was deflecting a fusillade of similar queries, the ship’s horn blasted several times, indicating that we would be easing away from the port momentarily. But I feared the next nine hours with Mr. Winchester might seem longer than the ride thus far from Chicago. Halfway to Port Said I think I learned all there was to know about the childhood, the marriage, the four children—three boys and a girl—and the career—distinguished, he assured me—of Mr. Bradley Winchester.

  “So tell me, Miss Londonderry, it is clear you will be remaining on board the Sydney through the canal. For a woman wheeling around the world you seem to be spending quite a few days at sea.” From the tone of his voice I knew that Mr. Winchester, perhaps unsatisfied with my businesslike demeanor, was challenging me, albeit politely.

  As I often did when confronted with such questions, I told him that the terms of the wager allowed me, in addition to passage across the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, which were, after all, not passable by bicycle, one thousand and five hundred nautical miles at sea. The numbers I dispensed varied for my own convenience, but it was a stock answer that allowed me to deflect challenges to my endeavor.

  “Once you have traversed the canal, what is your plan?” he asked.

  As I so often did, I said the first thing that came to mind.

  “I shall stay on the Sydney through the Persian Gulf to Aden and from there wheel my way across the Arabian peninsula and Persia and thence to India.�
�� Geographically this made little sense, as such an overland journey would have been much shorter from Jaffa. Starting from Aden would have added perhaps a thousand miles of treacherous riding. Mr. Winchester, being a man of the British admiralty, surely knew this, but rather than challenge me directly, he simply looked at me knowingly. It was clear from his expression he thought I was full of baloney.

  “Well, Miss Londonderry, you have surely chosen a difficult path. I shall be interested to know if you make it through safely or perish somewhere in the blast furnace of the endless sands of Arabia.”

  We had reached, it seemed, a mutual understanding of the nature of my journey. Mr. Winchester was at heart a chauvinist just like the rest of them, and he was not the first, nor would he be the last, to see through the veil. Such skeptics were of little concern to me at the moment, however. I was right where I wanted to be, doing just what I wanted to do. I was living, for the time being anyway, on my own terms.

  By the time we reached Port Said I had grown quite weary of Mr. Winchester. He was pedantic, arrogant, and self-involved. I must have listened to him discourse on Britain’s maritime history for close to three hours when the docks at Port Said came at last into view.

  “You have saved my journey, Mr. Winchester, and I am most grateful to you for that,” I said, as the ship reached its mooring.

  “It has been my honor, Miss Londonderry. You are certainly a determined woman, if not the most transparent. You will make your mark for women by hook or by crook!”

  I took his choice of words to be quite intentional and bristled at the idea that what I was doing was somehow crooked. I was hardly the first person on earth to take a little license with their own story and would surely not be the last. Mr. Winchester himself seemed a bit of a peacock himself.

  On the pier we shook hands, I thanked him profusely, said goodbye, and set off to find the Sydney. She would be sailing through the Suez for the Persian Gulf in just a few hours.

  * * *

  I told you, Mary dear, that I left Marseille in late January and arrived in Yokohama in early March, so it is plain that I had no designs on riding across the Arabian desert for Persia. It was a vast, sparsely inhabited territory with no true roadways to speak of. It was not my destiny to perish in the sands.

  There were about eighty passengers among the mail on board the Sydney, but I mingled little. The surprise encounter with Susie, and Mr. Winchester’s slightly menacing skepticism, left me a little unsettled. I wanted to keep my own company for a bit.

  A little more than a week after leaving Port Said the Sydney arrived in Colombo, the major port on an island that had for a century been a British Crown colony. Such British outposts, scattered the world over, had the odd effect of being both exotic and familiar at the same time. So firmly had the British made their stamp on the local cultures of these colonies that one could feel they had not set foot outside of English-speaking Britain. Thus, the impact of what might otherwise have felt strange, alien, foreign, mysterious, and intriguing was blunted by the determination of the British to make every locale feel like an extension of London or Liverpool. Colombo, with its dark-skinned, mostly Buddhist native population, was no exception.

  It was early afternoon on the seventh of February when the Sydney docked at Colombo, where she would remain overnight. Being a British outpost, and with the bicycle as much a phenomenon in Britain as it was in France and the States, it was not surprising that there was a local cycling club in the city. With help from the officials of the Crown who met the ship I quickly made contact with them, and by midafternoon a small gaggle of wheelmen and women had met me on the docks, from which we set out on a thirty-mile spin around the city and its outskirts, followed by a supper at a guesthouse frequented by British bureaucrats dispatched from London on government business. Of greatest interest were the ancient Buddhist temples in the city, several of which we stopped to examine as we wheeled around the city.

  The very next morning we were out to sea again, another one-week stretch during which there was little to do but refine the stories that would become a staple of the lectures I would give when I returned to America. The next stop was Singapore, where upon arrival I gave an interview to a local reporter.

  The next day I received a slap in the face from the Singapore Strait Times, and wondered if Mr. Winchester, for reasons known only to him, had set out to expose me as a fraud and ensure that I would never see the prize money I had been chasing for more than seven months. I was being a bit paranoid, but my concerns were not unfounded. News sometimes traveled slowly in those days, but travel it did, and it was entirely possible that a story in the Strait Times would appear a week or two later in a newspaper in San Francisco, Chicago, or even Boston.

  A WOMAN ON WHEELS, read the headline, 50,000 FOOLS AT MARSEILLE. The story described me as “a crank from that land of marvelous wagers and remarkable exploit,” the “50,000 fools” a reference to the throngs that saw me off in Marseille, hoodwinked, the paper suggested, into believing I was authentic. That number, of course, was my own count, and it did not impress the ink-stained wretches at the Strait Times. “But we fancy she exaggerates,” read the story. “Some women do.”

  “Singapore has been reached,” the story continued, “by the easy method of a French mail on the cheap. To the chagrin of the wagerers, she will be in Boston once more with the $5,000 legitimately earned according to the terms of the contract. Miss Londonderry, then, fortunately for journalism, retires on her laurels, and writes a book. Miss Londonderry has had experiences, of course, but they are reserved for the volume which a waiting world is bound to buy.”

  The press in Singapore wasn’t all negative, however. “Miss Annie Londonderry,” reported the Free Press, “the lady cyclist who has been seen cycling around near the Borneo Wharf, had dispensed with any superfluous outer garment or skirt above the knee and wears a pair of knickerbockers calculated to effectively display a pair of advertisement garters, advising everybody to ‘Ride Somebody’s tyres,’ or perhaps to wear ‘Untearable Twills.’ ” It was all quite risqué! The story continued: “The textual accuracy of the quotations is not vouched for, our representative (who is a modest man and fears to be misunderstood) not caring to appear as if gazing too intently in that quarter.”

  Oh, Mary, your old grandmother was quite a sight in those days, not above using a little sex appeal to advance myself!

  * * *

  I didn’t fully realize it then, but the prize money was starting to loom ever larger in my thinking. When I undertook the challenge, it was, of course, one of the attractions, but secondary to my insatiable desire to leave one life for another. Now that I was more than halfway around the world from Chicago, and traveling toward home rather than away from it, it’s importance was slowly growing. Ten thousand dollars was a queen’s ransom in those days, especially for a family always trying to outrace borderline poverty, and it would help me atone for a multiplicity of sins, first and foremost abandoning the family. The notion was slowly gaining even more traction in my mind that it might be the only way I could justify—to Grandpa, the children, and Bennett and Baila, and perhaps to myself—having torn a wide hole in the fabric of our family. Were I to fail to claim the prize and, still worse, be exposed as some kind of charlatan, the entire family would be humiliated, and they had already suffered the profound humiliation of my leaving in the first place.

  There was no way, I knew, to conceal the timeline of my travels, for anyone willing to do a little digging would surely realize I wasn’t covering so much ground, or water, on a bicycle. It occurred to me that any claim I would have to the prize money would lay not in my strict adherence to the terms of the wager, but in becoming enough of a cause célèbre that the colonel would rather grant me the prize money than endure the costs of the adverse publicity his refusal would generate. It was, therefore, more important than ever that as I got closer and closer to home, I build my celebrity and fix myself in the public eye, especially the eyes of women, as a
symbol of their struggles. For it was women, after all, that were still the great untapped market Colonel Pope had his eye on.

  Until now I had been met with little skepticism and more than a little adulation by the press wherever I had landed. But that story in the Singapore Strait Times dripped with sarcasm and contempt and branded me, in not so many words, as a fraud, pure and simple. It was a harbinger of things to come.

  Though I would not know it until I returned to the States several weeks later, as I was making my away across Asia on the Sydney, some negative notes about me were starting to appear in the American press, too. A few observant reporters scouring the news dispatches about me recognized that for a woman supposedly astride a bicycle I was popping up in cities quite distant from one another in a relatively short time. Many found my unabashed storytelling and willingness to sell myself to advertisers vulgar. But they were missing the point. Fame and notoriety, and hopefully the riches that would follow, though welcome, were not my primary ambitions. I was after the freedom of being a woman about the world, liberated from the pedestrian and soul-crushing demands of wifery and motherhood. And in all of this I was succeeding beyond my wildest dreams!

  After a brief stopover in Saigon, that beautiful French colonial city, it was just a couple of days’ sailing to Hong Kong and then four more to Shanghai, where I informed the editor of the Celestial Empire newspaper that I was engaged by twenty-two American newspapers to send dispatches about my travels (good luck finding any!) and that ten thousand people, quite a drop from the fifty thousand I’d boasted of earlier, and a brass band had seen me off at Marseille.