Pilgrim

by Timothy Findley

  Her focus was entirely on this curious man with the curious binoculars and curious notebook. He was as trim and neat and small as herself and he seemed almost as lonely, in spite of his attentions to whatever it was he was spying on. Whatever—whomever.

  She wondered.

  He could be a confidential agent, she speculated. Or a private investigator. Or perhaps a jealous husband, whose wife is in a dalliance with some romantic, dashing young man. An officer in the Hussars. A naval personage. An artist or a doomed poet. What exciting lives some people lived.

  Some people, yes. Others, no.

  All at once, the man turned and looked directly at her.

  She closed her eyes and smiled. The thought occurred to her: I have been chosen.

  When she opened her eyes, she saw that the man was older than expected. Given his almost military bearing, his squared shoulders, his trim waist, his erect posture, she had thought he might be in his mid-to-late twenties, but clearly, he was over forty.

  Over forty! A worldly man. A practised man. A challenge.

  His eyes, at a distance, appeared to be smoky grey. His nose was handsome, rising straight as an ivory bone to a pair of winglike eyebrows whose arching shapes mimicked flight. His mouth was a wide, thin line, his lower lip moist and full, his upper lip masked by a full and elegant moustache whose corners he had twisted into the shape of dimples.

  O, mercy, mercy! What is going to happen?

  His approach was so deliberate, there could be no mistaking his destination.

  Even though the young woman was seated in the shade of the linden trees, she raised her hand to protect her eyes from the light through which he walked towards her.

  “Madam,” he said when he had stopped within four feet of her, “may one ask if you are alone?”

  “One may,” she replied, barely audible. She had fully intended to be heard, but something in her throat prevented her voice from rising much beyond a whisper. “Though I may appear to be alone, I am waiting for a friend,” she lied. There was no friend. There never had been since childhood. The very word was foreign to her. Nevertheless, it was a useful word when a gentleman called. “She may well attend me at any moment.” The word she, the woman thought, was a masterstroke. It did not prevent her from being a continued object of desire, but placed her in a protective embrace.

  The gentleman had removed his hat. “So much the better,” he said. “There is no need to ask but a moment of your time, if you would be so kind.”

  She was bitterly disappointed by this. A mere moment of her time was hardly likely to lead to a romance.

  “May one inquire if madam is of Scots descent? I detect an accent quite familiar to my ears.”

  “Why, yes. I have come here from Aberdeen. Perhaps you would be kind enough to tell me your name. I am not accustomed to having conversations with people to whom I have not been introduced.”

  “With pleasure. My name is Henry Forster and I come from London Town.” He said the latter almost as one might have sung it—rather gaily, with a lilt.

  “London Town?”

  “Yes. From Chelsea on the River Thames. Cheyne Walk, to be exact. If madam has never had the pleasure, I would suggest she acquaint herself with this most delightful purview. A landscape of complete enchantment.”

  Was this an invitation?

  The young woman blushed.

  “I am called,” she said, “Miss Leslie Meikle.”

  “Most unusual. And pleasing. Meikle—a Celtic name.”

  “Leslie is my mother’s family name. My parents had hoped to have a son, but I arrived instead and they gave the honour to me.”

  “How do you do.”

  “How do you do, and how might I be of assistance?”

  “I shall be brief, Miss Meikle,” said Forster. “I am on a mission and I require some photographs. Two. Perhaps three. If you would be so kind.”

  He pulled the Kodak from his shoulder and removed it from its cloth case.

  “You depress the lever just so,” he told her, opening the accordion folds and demonstrating. “I should like one of each profile and one of me facing the lens.”

  Leslie Meikle rose and, accepting the camera, stepped into the light.

  She would be, Forster thought, a perfect beauty if one had found her in a pastoral setting. The blue eyes, the apple cheeks, the cherry lips. But her visage was somehow disconcerting in an urban landscape. The appearance of so much good health was upsetting to someone whose life of late had been spent in the depths of a hotel room and beneath the shade of a bowler hat while he grew a moustache to disguise his true appearance.

  Forster placed himself in the sunlight and Leslie Meikle stood five paces away and aimed the camera at his left profile. The hat was now on his head.

  “May a person ask if these photographs are for a loved one, Mister Forster?”

  Snap!

  “They are for a colleague who has been incarcerated.”

  Leslie Meikle let the camera fall to her waist.

  “Incarcerated? Do you mean imprisoned?”

  “Not precisely, no. Nonetheless, he is prevented from freedom. He is restrained.”

  Leslie Meikle repositioned herself.

  Right profile.

  How romantic, she thought. To have a colleague prevented from freedom. Surely this is intrigue worthy of an Elinor Glyn novel, or one perhaps by Mrs Henry Wood.

  Snap!

  Full face next and last.

  “I am intrigued, Mister Forster. May I ask what you intend to do—if anything—about your colleague’s unfortunate circumstances?”

  “You may, but I shall not answer. I only want him to have these photographs to remind him that someone attends to his needs on the outside.”

  Snap!

  On the outside. How utterly dramatic!

  In her mind’s eye, Leslie Meikle conjured the image of the Incarcerated Colleague clinging to his bars, his gaze on the distant mountains.

  “Here is your camera, sir,” she said, handing the Kodak over to Forster.

  “Perhaps,” Forster said with as much diffidence as he could muster, “Miss Meikle would allow me to take a photograph for the sake of having a memento of our encounter.” Why pass up a pretty face when it was there for the asking?

  “I would be delighted.”

  Leslie Meikle, Forster would write in his notebook—not quite certain of the spelling but certain enough of the spell. In time, as he gazed at her smiling image on the Lindenhof Terrace, he would regret that his duty to Pilgrim had prevented him from pressing for more of her acquaintance.

  As for Leslie Meikle herself, she would never forget Henry Forster, with his bowler hat, his smoky eyes, his ivory bone of a nose and his winglike eyebrows. Nor his shoulders neatly squared, nor his waist as trim as her own. Nor his unkissed lips and their promise of moist embraces.

  That shall be Tomorrow

  Not tonight:

  I must bury sorrow

  Out of sight.

  Why does one inevitably remember such lines? Leslie Meikle wondered.

  She would go home. She would not marry. She would care for her elders and perish. It would take forty years. Not that she would spend those forty years entirely in the shadow of what she would always claim were Forster’s advances, but he would be there forever in the company of each year’s ungarnered others—her collection of shadows, as she came to think of them—her regiment of gentlemen-who-might-have-pressed-for-more-but-had-not.

  Divide the human race by two, Pilgrim would write of another unfulfilled encounter, and there you have them: the millions who never connect.

  As for the photograph of Leslie Meikle, Forster would tuck it into his notebook and remove it from time to time to gaze at the poignant edge of longing in her eyes and the thwarted smile that had all but failed to reach her lips. What if? she seemed to be saying. What if we had met some other time and place? And what if…? But nothing comes of that and in her eyes she knew it.

  4
<
br />   Lady Quartermaine had been kind enough to secure Forster’s accommodation until the end of July. While she herself had been certain of her impending death, she in no way communicated this to Forster. Her excuse for prepaying his expenses was expressed only as a desire to acknowledge his independence of her. She assured him—as he well knew himself—that Mister Pilgrim would repay her on his return to London, once his treatments had proved successful. That Doctor Jung could help him, she said, was undoubted. It was merely a matter of time.

  Until the day of the avalanche, which now seemed remote as something from another age, Lady Quartermaine had maintained her liaison with Pilgrim through her meetings with and letters to and from Doctor Jung. Early on, in the wake of their arrival in Zürich, she had also been allowed to visit him twice—perhaps three times. Forster had seen his employer only on the occasion of Lady Quartermaine’s remains being removed to England. They had not spoken that day and Pilgrim had been so distracted that it was entirely possible he had not even recognized his valet. There had also been that other person—the blond and swaggering Swiss who had taken on Forster’s duties, and who looked so entirely unsuitable for the position. The man had not even known how to clothe himself appropriately.

  Consequently, Forster had presented himself on five different occasions, requesting that he be allowed to visit with Mister Pilgrim, only to be told each time that Mister Pilgrim is otherwise engaged. He is receiving treatment…he is under heavy sedation…he is in the baths. Whenever Forster telephoned, he was told the same. The excuses were legion. And clearly, none of his messages was being transmitted. When he tried to leave a note, he was told: you may, but you should be aware that all written communications to or from patients are monitored—for the sake of the patient’s mental stability.

  Mental stability. Psychiatric modes and methods were a complete mystery to Forster. He thought of them as mumbo-jumbo and therefore that his employer had somehow been kidnapped into a system of seance, hypnotism and the darker aspects of voodoo. All this to say nothing of the dreadful possibility that Pilgrim had managed at long last to kill himself, and the clinicians, fearing for their reputations, were plotting to disguise his success as being the result of some disease. All of this had placed Forster on the point of despair. He felt a growing certainty that at some moment soon he would be forced to take matters into his own hands.

  Though not a devoted reader as such, Forster was devoted to the tales of Sherlock Holmes. Otherwise, books were not by any means Forster’s constant companions. Holmes was a different story. Reading of his exploits was pure heaven. Part of Forster’s fascination with the great detective lay in his ingenious use of disguise. It was every child’s dream to be someone else and Forster had never lost his fascination for it.

  A person can be anyone he wants to be, he came to understand from his reading of Sherlock Holmes, so long as he believes.

  This was Holmes’s great secret. Disguise means nothing if it is purely physical. This way, Forster understood that merely to grow a moustache and dye one’s hair was bootless unless the man beneath the disguise was a red-headed braggart or a suave survivor of the Indian campaigns or a slumming member of the upper classes who has strayed down the social ladder in search of cocaine and opium. He had attempted to play all three and, to his disappointment, had discovered there was a fourth incarnation which suited him best—namely, the bank clerk on holiday abroad. Only this incarnation was acceptable, so he had found in encounters such as that with Leslie Meikle—though from time to time, he daydreamed of being a bank clerk who had embezzled a million pounds.

  And so it was as the bank clerk that Forster had been roaming the town, casually gathering information about the Burghölzli while trying to devise a way of communicating with his employer without revealing his true identity.

  Using his binoculars and the several vantage points available to him, Forster had also been keeping a record of Pilgrim’s comings and goings for almost three weeks.

  Then Pilgrim had disappeared from his windows and balcony—on Saturday, June 1st—and when his absence from view had gone on for three days, Forster at last became alarmed to the degree that he had begun to plot a means of rescue.

  He must somehow gain entry to the Clinic, playing the role of the bank clerk. He had gleaned the names of a half-dozen other English patients in residence, by keeping his ears open in the dining-room, bar and lounges of the hotel. He would claim to be a brother or a cousin to any one of these.

  And then—as if by his usual arrangement with death—Pilgrim had risen from the grave and shown himself at his windows on Monday last—the 10th of June.

  It was on the following Thursday that Forster had met Leslie Meikle. The photographs she had taken would be used to inform Pilgrim of the changes he should expect to see in his valet’s appearance, when they next met—whenever that might be.

  By then, Forster had already begun plotting how to achieve that meeting. Now that Pilgrim had reappeared, the next step was practical but difficult to achieve. Communication.

  The only other books Forster had read besides Arthur Conan Doyle’s were books on the subject of pigeonry. In London, at Cheyne Walk, Forster had asked for and received permission to build a dovecote, where he raised and nurtured a variety of pigeons. The birds were receiving, at this moment of his absence, the ministrations of Mrs Matheson, the housekeeper/cook, and of her nephew, a young lad of fourteen whose name was Alfred.

  Alfred also worked in the garden and slept in the cubby-hole beneath the back stairs. He was dark-haired and seemingly dour, but he loved the birds in his care and had a natural affinity with their needs and desires. He knew precisely when—and when not—to attend them, when they required their moments of freedom and when the shutters must be closed to protect them against the night and early morning visitations of pigeon hawks, owls, rooks and even the occasional ferret.

  Forster had a deep affection for this sullen, silent boy, whose demeanour reminded him of his own at an early age—the tragedy of loss, when all that he had known and trusted was swept away in a fire that took, besides his home, his parents and his siblings. In Alfred’s case, the reflection of this tragedy was in the vengeful destruction of his mother, his brother and the roof above his head by his drunken, abusive and molesting father. Whatever atrocities of sexual perversion Alfred had suffered had never been revealed in so many words—but they could be told in his eyes and in his sad refusal of male friendship, which Forster had attempted to offer him. And yet, the boy had stayed. He loved his aunt, Eulalie Matheson—he loved “his” gardens and he loved, above all, “his” pigeons.

  On the roof of the Hôtel Baur au Lac there was a dovecote of some size. It housed more than thirty birds. And it provided Forster with an idea. Whose can it be? he had asked, only to be told it belonged to the sous-chef in the hotel’s kitchens—a man called Dominic Fréjus.

  For a time, Forster was too perturbed to inquire further. Were the birds supper? This would be unacceptable. Forster was one of those carnivorous creatures who could bear everything about the consumption of meat but the killing that provided it. To know one’s prey was akin to murder. To choose one’s prey was worst of all. And so he watched and listened and kept a tally.

  When, after two weeks of this, it was clear the pigeons in the dovecote were not declining in number, he at last approached Dominic Fréjus and asked if he might observe the birds at close quarters.

  The sous-chef had no problem with this and ultimately allowed Forster to take on one of the feedings.

  On the 14th of June—the day after Forster’s encounter with Leslie Meikle—he spoke at length with Fréjus in the early morning hours concerning the various types of pigeons collected in the rooftop dovecote. Rock doves; ringed doves; homers and racers. And the doomed passengers, a pair of which Dominic Fréjus had imported from North America in the hopes that he could breed them.

  “Alas,” he told Forster, “they will not breed in captivity. It is, for me—as for them�
�a great tragedy. In North America, they are all but exterminated.”

  Forster had bowed his head and allowed a moment’s silence as if in memoriam. Not that he felt no sorrow—in fact, he felt it profoundly. But he was on a quest—and he needed an ally. To this end, if Dominic Fréjus was sympathetic, he had found the perfect coconspirator.

  “I need,” Forster said, “six homing pigeons.”

  “I have but four,” Fréjus told him. “Why do you need them?”

  “To correspond with a friend who is receiving treatment in the Burghölzli Clinic.”

  “Ah, yes.” Fréjus smiled. “A victim of the yellow wagon.”

  “What is the yellow wagon?”

  “It is the wagon used to collect the Clinic’s specimens.”

  “I see.”

  “You have not observed it?”

  “No.”

  “You will, in time. It passes almost every day through the streets. Mostly, its clients are the families of crazy people, but on occasion it carries people off from the parks and from the steps of the Cathedral. Religious fanatics, you know—or the incapacitated who have drunk themselves into a corner. And so—you want my homers?”

  “Only to borrow, if I may. They will, of course, return to you—but I am hoping they will do so bearing messages for me. My friend is devoted to birds, and at home in England we often correspond by this method. I thought it might cheer him up.” Forster considered this an inoffensive lie and felt no compunction in telling it.

  Dominic Fréjus leaned forward where he sat on the parapet of the hotel roof and looked at the bank clerk, slowly nodding his head.

  “It would be a good thing,” he said, “to brighten the days of one who is ill.” He smiled. “Of course, you will need a cage,” he added.

  “Indeed.”

  “But you need not worry. I have such a cage in which I transport them on our excursions into the countryside. I release them perhaps a mile, two miles away and they find their own way home. The exercise is good for them. I trust they will be fed by your friend?”