SEVEN

PILGRIM'S PROGRESS

Film sent to the Detroit News and titled “Detroit Tourist Reaches Bucharest”¹ shows the two Wanderwell cars tearing at breakneck speed through a crowded University Square, to the visible annoyance of one pedestrian in a gigantic Balkan winter hat. Twelve hundred miles away Aloha was depressed. Although back home at the Villa Marie-Thérèse, life was not unfolding as she had envisioned. She had spent a full year on the road, and there were no Hollywood roles, no modelling contracts, no adoring public, and her Wanderwell Around the World dream was fizzling into vapour. Instead of basking in the limelight as the main attraction of an intrepid international expedition, she was sitting among the embroidered pillows of her mother’s parlour making small talk and munching on biscuits and baked scones. She had been replaced by a buck-toothed Dutch girl.

Shortly after Christmas, Margaret invited some friends from England to come for a visit. The Dawsins had been the Hedley’s neighbours back in England for a generation and were among the few friends to come to Margaret’s aid after Herbert’s death. Like Margaret, Mrs. Dawsin had lost her husband in the war. When Aloha had first arrived in England in 1919, she had stayed with the Dawsins and had formed a close friendship with Stanley, the oldest of two brothers.

Aloha and Stanley spent much of the time together, visiting cafés, riding horses, and going for long beachside walks. After a week of mostly unchaperoned time, Margaret nudged her daughter, saying, “‘I hope you are in love with him as much as he is with you.’” It was a statement Aloha “was expected to consider most profoundly.”2

She didn’t.

Settling down was the furthest thing from her mind, though she did enjoy Stanley’s company, and looks. “How gorgeous he was! So veddy, veddy British — tweeds and all.”³ Aloha would later blame the reluctance to marry on Stanley, but really it was she who demurred and sent him back to England without any commitment. Her fights with Margaret grew more frequent and Aloha concluded again that she was “really better off away from home.”

 

Damn my beastly temper! I had such quarrels with Mum — outbursts that crushed her, poor dear. Each homecoming was worse. Wasted her time with embroidery when all could be bought machine made; pridefully she enticed me to inspect her fine leather tooling, embossed pewter — such artiness quite démodées.4

 

By January 24, 1924, Aloha had returned to the only thing she knew how to do. She was in Marseille with Armstrong and someone she only notes as “E.” Fate, apparently, had left the scene. Taking a page from the Wanderwell playbook, they printed postcards and attempted to book theatres, showing the films that Aloha had assembled in Paris. As had happened in the summertime, though, they met with very little success. “On the whole the thing is running rottenly,” she wrote. “Marseille has had so many dozens of globetrotters making a mess of things, we’ll have to beat it.”5 When wires began arriving from Wanderwell, Aloha decided to call it quits. She scrawled a paragraph in her journal, announcing that after “Wally’s innumerable demands for my return and a long struggle with my private feelings I wired him [that] I’ll meet him in Egypt.”6 Aloha returned to Nice. Stanley was waiting for her.

*

When Aloha announced that she was heading for Egypt, Stanley offered to come along. It was an idea that, as it turned out, suited everyone. Margaret was pleased that her daughter had a reliable escort, Stanley was happy to spend more time wooing Aloha, and Aloha relished the opportunity to turn the tables on Walter and arrive at his doorstep with her splendid “fiancé” — taller, younger, richer, and more handsome than Wanderwell.

Aloha and Stanley, whom she’d taken to calling “Locey,” arrived in Marseille at 5:20 a.m. on Wednesday, March 26, 1924, sleepy eyed and frozen. By nine o’clock the duo were at the offices of the Compagnie Inter Messagerie Maritime, attempting to purchase tickets to Alexandria aboard a two-funnelled, 11,375-ton steamship called, appropriately, the Sphinx.7

*

Aloha and Locey watched at the portholes as ancient Alexandria swam into view. Even the harbour seemed exotic, with its flat roofs, its forests of masts and funnels, its Citadel of Qaitbay, its boardwalk crowded with white turbaned stevedores and camels in the bleaching sun. Here, at last, was a world made for adventure and discovery. They raced from the ship, placed their bags into storage, and headed for the post office, expecting to find a note of instruction from Captain Wanderwell. But there was nothing and no one could tell them anything.

Aloha found a bank and exchanged the twenty-eight francs she had in reserve, hardly enough to last them a few days.

 

As a last recourse I decided to go to the British Consulate. Lieut. had once told me that by leaving one’s passport as a guarantee, it was possible to obtain one’s fare to any end of the World. . . . So off we went. I interviewed the Vice Consul and after a good cross-examination received the sum of two Egyptian pounds. What a relief!8

 

The best course of action, they decided, was to proceed to the expedition’s next likely destination, and that evening they were on the 6:15 train south to Cairo.

The next morning, Aloha and Locey headed to Cairo’s central post office to learn that Captain Wanderwell “had just been for his mail.”9 He did not leave a forwarding address, however, which meant he had not left town. By mid-afternoon they had found a cinema where Captain Wanderwell was scheduled to call at 6:00 p.m.

*

Aloha and Wanderwell exchanged a fraternal hug, after which she introduced Locey to the captain. If Locey’s presence was intended to unnerve the captain, he didn’t show it. To the contrary, he seemed entirely unsurprised by everything — Aloha’s presence, her partner — nor did he comment on her sudden disappearance in Europe. “At this point I was extremely surprised as he showed no signs whatever of the shock it must have been to him.”

At supper that evening, Aloha and Locey were introduced to the current Wanderwell crew members. The first was Benno, a German Jew with a noticeable speech impediment who had met up with Wanderwell in Palestine. Carl Martens was a German linguist and musician, whom Aloha described as “a money maker, keen of eye and better of soul.” And finally was a German girl with the unlikely name of “Fanny.” Of the old crew, only Jarocki, the Polish mechanic, remained. After introductions had been made, Locey gave Aloha “a lean look to see what I thought of my new old surroundings. I laughed and reminded him that this was not the crew (I had been part of).”10

*

The expedition was thriving. A letter written by the managing director of the Eastern Automobiles Supplies and Transport Company in Alexandria enthusiastically thanked the expedition for its effective “advertising propaganda” and was pleased to contribute “the sum of £30 towards your expenses whilst in the Delta. Should you decide to visit Upper Egypt a similar sum will be paid to you by our Cairo Branch.”11 Upon arrival in Cairo, not only did Wanderwell receive the promised sum and “any spare parts you want for your cars” but also a one-ton supply truck for use during his travels in Egypt.

By sunset, the expedition was motoring through Cairo’s dusty outskirts, looking not for a hotel but for al fresco desert lodgings. While the sky darkened, Aloha gaped at the rolling desert, at bungalows with bursting flower gardens, and then, as they climbed a steep hill leading to a level plain, she caught her first glimpse of the pyramids at Giza. To her amazement, Walter kept driving until they came to rest “on a little flat piece of sand overlooking the Sphinx.”

Euphoric, Aloha wandered out into her surroundings, leaving Locey to help the others build a camp of tents and cars less than thirty yards from Cheops, near the Eastern cemetery between the Great Pyramid and the Sphinx. Aloha removed her shoes and walked through the desert’s deep stillness, in a place where every noise carried, undiminished for miles. She sat listening to some night birds calling through the empty air, until Captain Wanderwell approached and suggested they go for a walk. The two strolled out across the sands, away from camp, while “each in turn told his story.” Wanderwell described the trip through Romania, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine, arriving, eventually, in Egypt.12 Aloha gave a somewhat less exciting account of her activities during the three months they’d been apart. The two walked and chatted for so long that “it was getting on to morning before I finally turned in to N^o III.”13

The next day an unexpected visitor strolled into camp: it was Lotti, a German girl who had joined the tour in Jerusalem and then left in Cairo to be with her husband. Described as a short, boisterous heavyweight, she had walked the 5 miles from Cairo to find the camp at Giza, arriving sunburnt but laughing. The men, surprised by her appearance, ran to their kits to return various items they assumed she had left behind. Meanwhile, Fanny had decided that one night of sleeping in a car in the desert was enough. She would leave with the crew’s next visit to Cairo.

Wanderwell had arranged to meet a cinematographer from Pathé News, “but the gentleman never arrived so, like foolish kids, just when the sun was at its highest, we decided to take a walk across the desert to visit the catacombs on the far side of the Sphinx. The heat was excruciating.”14 Aloha’s reference to the “catacombs” is odd since no such structures were popularly known to exist.¹⁵

 

We crossed an ancient graveyard in a flat between two huge dunes. The graves are marked by some half dozen uneven stones stuck in the sand, around which the latter has blown up forming little mounds. On we pushed, not a one daring to drop behind but when at last the party scaled the wall of stone up to the cave-like catacombs and once more found themselves in the shade, the temperature showed on our faces. We looked at each other in astonishment.¹⁶

 

Vehicles of the expedition preparing to camp for the night near Cheops and the Sphinx, Egypt, 1923.

A little later on, Aloha describes the site as “the hole in the rocks,” but her notes are not detailed enough to be certain where they trekked that day. The Egyptian desert had done in twenty-four hours what months of travel through Europe had not: Aloha had firmly decided that this life, this adventuring life, was the life for her. Her notebooks overflow with observations and giddy accounts of expedition life, from the ritual of washing her face using water from an old benzene can, to becoming transfixed by the sight of two Egyptian boys walking along the crest of dune, “their flowing robes (making) a pretty silhouette.”¹⁷ Even after a night spent cramped on one of the car’s horsehair benches, she was enchanted by the dawn, as the sky became stained with “pale lemons and oranges” and the sun spilled over “the cool sands, casting great shadows behind the Sphinx and Pyramids.”

 

There comes with this trip a complete sense of freedom which I doubt possible to be found in any other job in the world. There is absolutely nothing to worry about and the greatest of our annoyances do not reach beyond the petty troubles amongst the crew.¹⁸

 

Perhaps the only person as wowed by the desert as Aloha was Walter. There are more photographs of this spot than anywhere else he’d yet travelled, including pictures of the men climbing to the top of Cheops and a stunning photo of Unit N^o III parked on the Sphinx’s back.

*

From Giza the expedition travelled to the step pyramids at Saqqara where they visited the five thousand-year-old Pyramid of Djoser, considered the earliest stone structure of its size in the world.19 From there they continued east across the Nile on the Kasr el Nil Bridge to the oasis of Mit Rahina, which Aloha described as “the promised land,” consisting of a large green valley between the Nile to the west and the desert to the east. They had come to visit “two remarkable statues,” the first known as the Alabaster Sphinx of Mit Rahina (which at that time was “sitting in a pond”) and the second “a most remarkable stone figure reposing on two huge blocks,” almost certainly a reference to the now-famous statue of Ramses II.

The crew turned in early, expecting a dawn departure. Aloha, however, could not sleep. Mosquitoes and a variety of imaginary horrors disturbed her sleep. Then, just as the sky was beginning to lighten, an unusual noise sped her to full consciousness.

 

I heard footsteps, several stealthy footsteps. They came close, there must have been five or six men. Then I heard deep gruff voices . . . there was nothing to do but lie perfectly still and pray that one of the boys would be awakened. The voices became louder and then died away, they were passing the camp. What ghastly suspense. . . . I pictured a bloodthirsty attempt to capture the girls, a struggle amongst the men with the clanging of knives. Suddenly . . . a man stuck his head through the canvas on Lotti’s side of the tent. . . . A general commotion . . . Steve20 grabbed a revolver.²¹

 

A shrill exchange took place until one of the intruding men made an emphatic speech in Arabic. Lotti, the only member of the crew to understand him, responded. Whatever she said seemed to satisfy the men who turned and left the camp. The crew demanded an explanation, which Lotti could hardly choke out for laughing. “The Shiek of Mir Rahina . . . oh, boy, wants to know whether we would like eggs and milk for breakfast.”

The Arab men, it turned out, had been sitting by the well all night long, keeping watch over the campers until 6:00 a.m. when, hungry from their all-night vigil, they began discussing breakfast and thought they would invite the visitors to join them. When the men returned, they placed food in the centre of the crew’s eating area and signalled them to begin eating. As “Cap reached for the pot, the native grabbed his hand, took a mouthful for himself, grinned.” Cap, “delighted by the old desert tradition,” instructed Lotti to tell them that they were excellent hosts.22

*

The expedition returned to Cairo on the sixth of April to gather supplies for the next leg — south towards Suez. They accepted two nights’ free accommodations at the Palace Hotel and were especially grateful to “raid the bathrooms.” The fuel truck was returned to Ford and passage was booked on the SS Borulus for April 11, travelling down the Red Sea to Aden. The crew drove due east through hot, dry air, along smooth roads like beads on a string, marvelling at mirages or spying camel skeletons until at last there came the first blue sheen of the great Red Sea, then the freighters lying at anchor, and then the square white buildings of bustling, little Port Tewfik,23 gateway to the Suez.

*

On May 3, 1924, Locey commandeered Aloha’s journal and wrote several bizarre pages in a florid script. His entries began with a short dedication.

 

As a memory to my relations with Aloha [sic] I am supplementing into her “log” our journey, with the Wanderwell Expedition by the SS Borulos [sic] of the Khedivial Mail Line, from Suez (Egypt) to Aden (Arabia – British).

 

He recounted events on their voyage, including the spectacle at Port Tewfik when two “strange looking automobiles” were hoisted onto the steamer’s deck — a scene which “might be entered into the category of the, to say the least, interesting.” Later he confessed his connection with “Miss Aloha Wanderwell, who, by the bye, calls me ‘Locey’ and claims the relationship of cousin (of the first degree) to myself, which I am in no position to either deny or to rectify.” He found the Red Sea “as blue or as green as any other sea” but was excited by the promise of stops along the way in towns “with names so terrible that I could not possibly write them all here.”

His writing, he claimed, was “just for the sake of wasting a little more ink,” but by the close of his paragraphs, cloaked in a mock poetic voice, his purpose became clear: this was a farewell.

 

You have wandered with me, Aloha, along the gentle, gay and strange French Riviera. You have sped with me across the blue Mediterranean Sea, in Oriental towns hast thou and I wandered, and under desert sun and desert stars we have sat, eaten, laughed, talked and sung. In shaded oasis, not far from the cruel sun, have we sat to think a dream, and both up and down the Red Sea have we travelled — yet you and I are just GOOD FRIENDS — oh girl, oh pal! Is that not enough?

 

The last line wishes Aloha success, “though it is not mine,” and signs off, “Ever your sincere friend, Stanley L. Dawsin. May 3rd, 1924.”

Locey’s note was provoked by a serious turn of events. On arriving in Aden, the British authorities refused to accept the Laissez-Passer travel documents issued in Suez (also British). Although often used as an emergency passport, a Laissez-Passer is often only valid for one-way travel to a specified country. In this case, the documents were stamped “good for India,” a certification which local officials felt was insufficient to allow Aloha and others in the crew to come ashore, even if only to change vessels. Only Walter and Jarocki were travelling on traditional passports, an event which so alarmed the authorities they threatened to reject the entire expedition, complaining about Germans, funny passports, and insufficient money. Aloha’s and Locey’s real passports were still with the consul in Alexandria. For three days they argued with officials, all the while living on the deck of the Borulus, waiting for clarification from the consul in Suez.

It was all too much for the Wanderwell crew. Aloha made a hasty entry in her journal, announcing that “the crew of Wanderwell II and III has once more broken up, as it always does and as always only I return to the one man I love, my brother Walter.”24 It’s a noteworthy passage, marking the end of another crew and Aloha’s first plain-spoken confession of her feelings for Walter.

 

Lotti, as habituel on moving occasions got horribly drunk, Martens to spite Cap broke the lock on the back of N^o III and was about to dispense with all the papers belonging to the trip when his conscience smote him and he left the job half done. . . . Benno with less than 15 piastres25 to his name raged about like a madman, only Locey was silent, away on the aft deck smoking cigarets, leaving the heavens to take care of him.²⁶

 

Of the crew, only Aloha and Jarocki would continue. For now, they travelled back to Suez, where they would scatter. Walter remained in Aden with the cars and the gear. The usual tedium of travel by sea was spiked with the shock of their sudden dissolution. The ship’s captain took pity on them and gave them exclusive use of the aft deck, where they slept and filled their time with music, arguments about religion, swearing lessons (courtesy of boisterous Lotti), attempts to hypnotize each other, arguments about food, and gossip about Captain Wanderwell’s recent tryst with van der Ray. According to Jarocki, van der Ray, whom they’d nicknamed “Puck,” was madly in love with Wanderwell and planned to meet the cars in Bombay in May. If the news worried Aloha, she didn’t let on. “Steve dislikes her (perhaps he is jealous, ha ha!) so that makes all the anecdotes lopsided but nevertheless interesting.”27

When the ship arrived in Massawa on May 3, Aloha received a telegram. “I opened the yellow paper to read: Your passport obtained, take steamer Nippon Massawa Aden Confirm Wanderwell.” Aloha was nonplussed. “Of all the things, oh! This was outrageous. Leave Steve (Jarocki) and the rest, go back to Aden. Whew!”28

Aloha and Lotti went ashore and made inquiries. Predictably, the Lloyd Triestino company would not issue tickets without a passport, and there was no time to receive an answer from Aden officials before the SS Borulus sailed. Downcast, Aloha and Lotti wandered through the hot, dusty town, stopping at a café for lunch. After discussing the situation with some curious locals, they were directed to a young Italian official who offered to help. “After a long discussion he promised to deposit 1000 Lire with the offices as a guarantee.”29

Aloha raced back to the Borulus, found Jarocki and instructed him to pack her things and give her the money that Wanderwell had entrusted them. She was, she announced, going back to Aden. “He thought I was crazy, so did the others. I went to see Locey, gave him £1 to get his passport back in Egypt. Shook a hasty goodbye with everyone, gave Steve £2 and got off the ship just before the gang plank went up, leaving on board most of my valuables which had been in Lotti’s valise.”

The circus that had been the Wanderwell Expedition was abruptly over and Aloha was alone.

 

I was taken to my benefactor’s house and duly, as expected, made love to.30 As he didn’t speak French, nor I Italian, it was a rotten position. I was scared to death but could do nothing to better the matter and was thankful when much against my will he kissed me goodnight and left the room . . . but it was not all over. At about 10 he returned . . . till as a last recourse I flew into a rage and cried. If I never prayed before, I did that night.³¹

 

Terrified and exhausted, the seventeen-year-old adventurer trudged up to the roof, the only place cool enough to sleep. Even in her precarious situation she recorded the sounds she heard from the rooftop, the tom-toms and hand claps that carried from some fireside, the sensation of a hundred domestic scenes settling to a close as the night became still and the village went to sleep.

The next day, Aloha was back at the shipping agency, trying to secure her passage aboard another ship, the SS Nippon. The agent, however, flatly refused to issue her deck passage. Instead, he placed her in first class. Aloha choked with gratitude. The prospect of good food, clean sheets, and a hot bath gave her the strength to get through one more day with her Italian benefactor. “Tomorrow,” she wrote, “there will be no more of those ‘emotional meetings.’”³²