The Toynbee Convector (4 page)

He arrived this night, moving with a terrible slowness to sit across the aisle from this woman of some years, her bosom like a fortress, her brow serene, her eyes with a kindness that had mellowed with time.

There was a black medical bag at her side, and a thermometer tucked in her mannish lapel pocket The ghastly man’s paleness caused her left hand to crawl up along her lapel to touch the thermometer.

“Oh, dear,” whispered Miss Minerva Halliday.

The maître d’ was passing. She touched his elbow and nodded across the aisle. “Pardon, but where is that poor man going?”

“Calais and London, Madame. If God is willing.”

And he hurried off.

Minerva Halliday, her appetite gone, stared across at that skeleton made of snow.

The man and the cutlery laid before him seemed one. The knives, forks, and spoons jingled with a silvery cold sound. He listened, fascinated, as if to the sound of his inner soul as the cutlery crept, touched, chimed; a tin tinnabulation from another sphere. His hands lay in his lap like lonely pets, and when the train swerved around a long curve his body, mindless, swayed now this way, now that, toppling.

At which moment the train took a greater curve and knocked the silverware, cluttering. A woman at a far table, laughing, cried out:

“I don’t
believe
it!”

To which a man with a louder laugh shouted:

“Nor do
I
!”

This coincidence caused, in the ghastly passenger, a terrible melting. The doubting laughter had pierced his ears.

He visibly shrank. His eyes hollowed and one could almost imagine a cold vapor gasped from his mouth. Miss Minerva Halliday, shocked, leaned forward and put out one hand. She heard herself whisper:

“
I
believe!”

The effect was instantaneous.

The ghastly passenger sat up. Color returned to his white cheeks. His eyes glowed with a rebirth of fire. His head swiveled and he stared across the aisle at this miraculous woman with words that cured.

Blushing furiously, the old nurse with the great warm bosom caught hold, rose, and hurried off.

Not five minutes later, Miss Minerva Halliday heard the maître d’ hurrying along the corridor, tapping on doors, whispering. As he passed her open door, he glanced at her.

“Could it be that you are—”

“No,” she guessed, “not a doctor. But a registered nurse. Is it that old man in the dining car?”

“Yes, yes! Please, Madame, this way!” The ghastly man had been carried back to his own compartment.

Beaching it, Miss Minerva Halliday peered within.

And there the strange man lay strewn, his eyes wilted shut, his mouth a bloodless wound, the only life in him the joggle of his head as the train swerved.

My God, she thought, he’s dead!

Out loud she said, “I’ll call if I need you.”

The maître d’ went away.

Miss Minerva Halliday quietly shut the sliding door and turned to examine the dead man—for surely he was dead. And yet. . . .

But at last she dared to reach out and to touch the wrists in which so much ice-water ran. She pulled back, as if her fingers had been burned by dry ice. Then she leaned forward to whisper into the pale man’s face.

“Listen very carefully. Yes?” For answer, she thought she heard the coldest throb of a single heartbeat. She continued. “I do not know how I guess this. I know who you are, and what you are sick of—” The train curved. His head lolled as if his neck had been broken. “I’ll tell you what you’re dying from!” she whispered. “You suffer a disease—of
people
!”

His eyes popped wide, as if he had been shot through the heart.

She said: “The people on this train are killing you. They are your affliction.”

Something like a breath stirred behind the shut wound of the man’s mouth.

“Yesssss....ssss.”

Her grip tightened on his wrist, probing for some pulse:

“You are from some middle European country, yes? Somewhere where the nights are long and when the wind blows, people
listen
? But now things have changed, and you have tried to escape by travel, but...”

Just then, a party of young, wine-filled tourists bustled along the outer corridor, firing off their laughter.

The ghastly passenger withered.

“How do... you...” he whispered, “... know.... thissss?”

“I am a special nurse with a special memory. I saw, I met, someone like you when I was six—”

“Saw?” the pale man exhaled.

“In Ireland, near Kileshandra. My uncle’s house, a hundred years old, full of nun and fog and there was walking on the roof late at night, and sounds in the hall as if the storm had come in, and then at last this shadow entered my room. It sat on my bed and the cold from his body made me cold. I remember and know it was no dream, for the shadow who came to sit on my bed and whisper... was much... like you.”

Eyes shut, from the depths of his arctic soul, the old sick man mourned in response:

‘And who... and
what
...am I?”

“You are not sick. And you are not dying... You are—” The whistle on the Orient Express wailed a long way off.

“—a ghost,” she said.

“Yesssss!” he cried.

It was a vast shout of need, recognition, assurance. He almost bolted upright. “Yes!” At which moment there arrived in the doorway a young priest, eager to perform. Eyes bright, lips moist, one hand clutching his crucifix, he stared at the collapsed figure of the ghastly passenger and cried, “May I—?”

“Last rites?” The ancient passenger opened one eye like the lid on a silver box. “From you? No.” His eye shifted to the nurse. “
Her
!”

“Sir!” cried the young priest. He stepped back, seized his crucifix as if it were a parachute ripcord, spun, and scurried off. Leaving the old nurse to sit examining her now even more strange patient until at last he said:

“How,” he gasped, “can you nurse me?”

“Why—” she gave a small self-deprecating laugh. “We must find a way.”

With yet another wail, the Orient Express encountered more mileages of night, fog, mist, and cut through it with a shriek.

“You are going to Calais?” she said. “And beyond, to Dover, London, and perhaps a casde outside Edinburgh, where I will be safe—”

“That’s almost impossible—” She might as well have shot him through the heart. “No, no, wait, wait!” she cried. “Impossible... without
me
! I will travel with you to Calais and across to Dover.”

“But you do not
know
me!”

“Oh, but I dreamed you as a child, long before I met someone like you, in the mists and rains of Ireland. At age nine I searched the moors for the Baskerville Hound.”

“Yes,” said the ghastly passenger. “You are English and the English
believe
!”

“True. Better than Americans, who doubt. French? Cynics! English is best. There is hardly an old London house that does not have its sad lady of mists crying before dawn.”

At which moment, the compartment door, shaken by a long curve of track, sprang wide. An onslaught of poisonous talk, of delirious chatter, of what could only be irreligious laughter poured in from the corridor. The ghastly passenger wilted.

Springing to her feet, Minerva Halliday slammed the door and turned to look with the familiarity of a lifetime of sleep-tossed encounters at her traveling companion.

“You, now,” she asked, “who exactly are you?”

The ghastly passenger, seeing in her face the face of a sad child he might have encountered long ago, now described his life:

“I have lived’ in one place outside Vienna for two hundred years. To survive, assaulted by atheists as well as true believers, I have hid in libraries in dust-filled stacks there to dine on myths and moundyard tales. I have taken midnight feasts of panic and terror from bolting horses, baying dogs, catapulting tomcats... crumbs shaken from tomb lids. As the years passed, my compatriots of the unseen world vanished one by one as castles tumbled or lords rented out their haunted gardens to women’s clubs or bed-and-breakfast entrepreneurs. Evicted, we ghastly wanderers of the world have sunk in tar, bog, and fields of disbelief, doubt, scorn, or outright derision. With the populations and disbeliefs doubling by the day, all of my specter friends have fled. I am the last, trying to train across Europe to some safe, rain-drenched castle-keep where men are properly frightened by soots and smokes of wandering souls. England and Scotland for me!”

His voice faded into silence.

“And your name?” she said, at last.

“I have no name,” he whispered. “A thousand fogs have visited my family plot A thousand rains have drenched my tombstone. The chisel marks were erased by mist and water and sun. My name has vanished with the flowers and the grass and the marble dust.” He opened his eyes.

“Why are you doing this?” he said. “Helping me?”

And at last she smiled, for she heard the right answer fell from her lips: “I have never in my life had a
lark
.”

“Lark?”

“My life was that of a stuffed owl. I was not a nun, yet never married. Treating an invalid mother and a half-bund father, I gave myself to hospitals, tombstone beds, cries at night, and medicines that are not perfume to passing men. So, I am something of a ghost myself, yes? And now, tonight, sixty-six years on, I have at last found in you a patient, magnificently different, fresh, absolutely new. Oh, Lord, what a challenge. A race! I will pace you, to face people off the train, through the crowds in Paris, then the trip to the sea, off the train, onto the ferry! It will indeed be a—”

“Lark!” cried the ghastly passenger. Spasms of laughter shook him.

“Larks? Yes, that is what we are!”

“But,” she said, “in Paris, do they not
eat
larks even while they roast priests?” He shut his eyes and whispered, “Paris? Ah, yes.” The train wailed. The night passed. And they arrived in Paris. And even as they arrived, a boy, no more than six, ran past and froze. He stared at the ghastly passenger and the ghastly passenger shot back a remembrance of Antarctic ice floes. The boy gave a cry and fled. The old nurse flung the door wide to peer out.

The boy was gibbering to his father at the far end of the corridor. The father charge along the corridor, crying:

“What goes
on
here? Who has frightened my—?”

The man stopped. Outside the door he now fixed his gaze on this ghastly passenger on the slowing braking Orient Express. He braked his own tongue.”—my son,” he finished.

The ghastly passenger looked at him quietly with fog-gray eyes.

“I—” The Frenchman drew back, sucking his teeth in disbelief. “Forgive me!” He gasped. “Regrets!”

And turned to run, shove at his son. “Trouble-maker. Get!” Their door slammed.

“Paris!” echoed through the train.

“Hush and hurry!” advised Minerva Halliday as she bustled her ancient friend out onto a platform milling with bad tempers and misplaced luggage.

“I am
melting
!” cried the ghastly passenger.

“Not where I’m taking you!” She displayed a picnic hamper and flung him forth to the miracle of a single remaining taxicab. And they arrived under a stormy sky at the Pere Lachaise cemetery. The great gates were swinging shut. The nurse waved a handful of francs. The gate froze.

Inside, they wandered at peace amongst ten thousand monuments. So much cold marble was there, and so many hidden souls, that the old nurse felt a sudden dizziness, a pain in one wrist, and a swift coldness on the left side of her face. She shook her head, refusing this. And they walked on among the stones.

“Where” do we picnic?” he said.

“Anywhere,” she said. “But carefully! For this is a French cemetery! Packed with cynics!
Armies
of egotists who burned people for their faith one year only to be burned for
their
faith the next! So, pick. Choose!” They walked. The ghastly passenger nodded. “This first stone. Beneath it:
nothing
. Death final, not a
whisper
of time. The second stone: a woman, a secret believer because she loved her husband and hoped to see him again in eternity... a murmur of spirit here, the turning of a heart.
Better
. Now this third gravestone: a writer of thrillers for a French magazine. But he
loved
his nights, his fogs, his castles.
This
stone is a proper temperature, like a good wine. So here we shall sit, dear lady, as you decant the champagne and we wait to go back to the train.”

She offered a glass, happily. “Can you drink?”

“One can try.” He took it. “One can only try.”

The ghastly passenger almost “died” as they left Paris. A group of intellectuals, fresh from seminars about Sartre’s “nausea,” and hot-air ballooning about Simone de Beauvoir, streamed through the corridors, leaving the air behind them boiled and empty.

The pale passenger became paler.

The second step beyond Paris, another invasion! A group of Germans surged aboard, loud in their disbelief of ancestral spirits, doubtful of politics, some even carrying books titled
Was God Ever Home?

The Orient ghost sank deeper in his x-ray image bones.

“Oh, dear,” cried Miss Minerva Halliday, and ran to her own compartment to plunge back and toss down a cascade of books.

“
Hamlet
!” she cried, “his father, yes? A
Christmas Carol
.
Four
ghosts!
Wuthering Heights
. Kathy
returns
, yes? To haunt the snows? Ah,
The Turn of the Screw
, and ...
Rebecca
! Then—my favorite!
The Monkey’s Paw
! Which?”

But the Orient ghost said not a Marley word. His eyes were locked, his mouth sewn with icicles.

“Wait!” she cried.

And opened the first book...

Where Hamlet stood on the castle wall and heard his ghost-of-a-father moan and so she said these words:

“ ‘Mark me... my hour is almost come... when I to sulphurous and tormenting flames... must render up myself…’ ”