The Toynbee Convector

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…’ ”

And then she read:

“ ‘I am thy father’s spirit,/Doomed for a certain term to walk the night’ ”

And again:

“ ‘... If thou didst ever thy dear father love... O, God!... Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder.’ ”

And yet again:

“ ‘... Murder most foul...’ ”

And the train ran in the night as she spoke the last words of Hamlet’s father’s ghost:

“ ‘... Fare thee well at once...’ ”

“ ‘... Adieu, adieu! Remember me.’ ”

And she repeated:

“ ‘... remember me!’ ”

And the Orient ghost quivered. She pretended not to notice but seized a further book:

“ ‘... Marley was dead, to begin with…’ ”

As the Orient train thundered across a twilight bridge above an unseen stream. Her hands flew like birds over the books. “ ‘I am the Ghost of Christmas Past!’ ”

Then:

“ ‘The Phantom Rickshaw glided from the mist and clop-clopped off into the fog—’ ”

And wasn’t there the faintest echo of a horse’s hooves behind, within the Orient ghost’s mouth?