MARLEY was dead: to begin with. There is no
doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the
clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it:
and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand
to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of
my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might
have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of
ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and
my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You will
therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a
door-nail.
Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did.
How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don't know how
many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole
assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even
Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent
man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an
undoubted bargain.
The mention of Marley's funeral brings me
back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This
must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am
going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet's Father died
before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a
stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would
be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy
spot--say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance-- literally to astonish his
son's weak mind.
Scrooge never painted out Old Marley's
name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and
Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the
business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both
names. It was all the same to him.
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the
grind-stone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching,
covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever
struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an
oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose,
shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips
blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his
head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low
temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and
didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.
External heat and cold had little influence
on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that
blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no
pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't know where to have him.
The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage
over him in only one respect. They often "came down" handsomely, and
Scrooge never did.
Nobody ever stopped him in the street to
say, with gladsome looks, "My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you
come to see me?" No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children
asked him what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life
inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men's
dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their
owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though
they said, "No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!"
But what did Scrooge care! It was the very
thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all
human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call
"nuts" to Scrooge.
Once upon a time--of all the good days in
the year, on Christmas Eve--old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was
cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the
court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts,
and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks
had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already-- it had not been light
all day--and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices,
like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every
chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the
narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come
drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived
hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.
The door of Scrooge's counting-house was
open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cell
beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but
the clerk's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But he
couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and so
surely as the clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted that it would
be necessary for them to part. Wherefore the clerk put on his white comforter,
and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a
strong imagination, he failed.
"A merry Christmas, uncle! God save
you!" cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge's nephew, who
came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his
approach.
"Bah!" said Scrooge,
"Humbug!"
He had so heated himself with rapid walking
in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge's, that he was all in a glow; his
face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.
"Christmas a humbug, uncle!" said
Scrooge's nephew. "You don't mean that, I am sure?"
"I do," said Scrooge. "Merry
Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry?
You're poor enough."
"Come, then," returned the nephew
gaily. "What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be
morose? You're rich enough."
Scrooge having no better answer ready on
the spur of the moment, said, "Bah!" again; and followed it up with
"Humbug."
"Don't be cross, uncle!" said the
nephew.
"What else can I be," returned
the uncle, "when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas!
Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas time to you but a time for paying
bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour
richer; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a
round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my
will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot who goes about with
'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried
with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"
"Uncle!" pleaded the nephew.
"Nephew!" returned the uncle
sternly, "keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in
mine."
"Keep it!" repeated Scrooge's
nephew. "But you don't keep it."
"Let me leave it alone, then,"
said Scrooge. "Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done
you!"
"There are many things from which I
might have derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare say,"
returned the nephew. "Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have
always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round--apart from the
veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can
be apart from that--as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant
time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and
women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of
people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and
not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle,
though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that
it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"
The clerk in the Tank involuntarily
applauded. Becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety, he poked the fire,
and extinguished the last frail spark for ever.
"Let me hear another sound from
you," said Scrooge, "and you'll keep your Christmas by losing your
situation! You're quite a powerful speaker, sir," he added, turning to his
nephew. "I wonder you don't go into Parliament."
"Don't be angry, uncle. Come! Dine
with us to-morrow."
Scrooge said that he would see him--yes,
indeed he did. He went the whole length of the expression, and said that he
would see him in that extremity first.
"But why?" cried Scrooge's
nephew. "Why?"
"Why did you get married?" said
Scrooge.
"Because I fell in love."
"Because you fell in love!"
growled Scrooge, as if that were the only one thing in the world more
ridiculous than a merry Christmas. "Good afternoon!"
"Nay, uncle, but you never came to see
me before that happened. Why give it as a reason for not coming now?"
"Good afternoon," said Scrooge.
"I want nothing from you; I ask
nothing of you; why cannot we be friends?"
"Good afternoon," said Scrooge.
"I am sorry, with all my heart, to
find you so resolute. We have never had any quarrel, to which I have been a
party. But I have made the trial in homage to Christmas, and I'll keep my
Christmas humour to the last. So A Merry Christmas, uncle!"
"Good afternoon!" said Scrooge.
"And A Happy New Year!"
"Good afternoon!" said Scrooge.
His nephew left the room without an angry
word, notwithstanding. He stopped at the outer door to bestow the greetings of
the season on the clerk, who, cold as he was, was warmer than Scrooge; for he
returned them cordially.
"There's another fellow,"
muttered Scrooge; who overheard him: "my clerk, with fifteen shillings a
week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I'll retire to
Bedlam."
This lunatic, in letting Scrooge's nephew
out, had let two other people in. They were portly gentlemen, pleasant to
behold, and now stood, with their hats off, in Scrooge's office. They had books
and papers in their hands, and bowed to him.
"Scrooge and Marley's, I
believe," said one of the gentlemen, referring to his list. "Have I
the pleasure of addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr. Marley?"
"Mr. Marley has been dead these seven
years," Scrooge replied. "He died seven years ago, this very
night."
"We have no doubt his liberality is
well represented by his surviving partner," said the gentleman, presenting
his credentials.
It certainly was; for they had been two
kindred spirits. At the ominous word "liberality," Scrooge frowned,
and shook his head, and handed the credentials back.
"At this festive season of the year,
Mr. Scrooge," said the gentleman, taking up a pen, "it is more than
usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and
destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want
of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts,
sir."
"Are there no prisons?" asked
Scrooge.
"Plenty of prisons," said the
gentleman, laying down the pen again.
"And the
"They are. Still," returned the
gentleman, "I wish I could say they were not."
"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in
full vigour, then?" said Scrooge.
"Both very busy, sir."
"Oh! I was afraid, from what you said
at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful
course," said Scrooge. "I'm very glad to hear it."
"Under the impression that they
scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude," returned
the gentleman, "a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the
Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it
is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices.
What shall I put you down for?"
"Nothing!" Scrooge replied.
"You wish to be anonymous?"
"I wish to be left alone," said
Scrooge. "Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I
don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people
merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned--they cost enough;
and those who are badly off must go there."
"Many can't go there; and many would
rather die."
"If they would rather die," said
Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
Besides--excuse me--I don't know that."
"But you might know it," observed
the gentleman.
"It's not my business," Scrooge
returned. "It's enough for a man to understand his own business, and not
to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies me constantly. Good afternoon,
gentlemen!"
Seeing clearly that it would be useless to
pursue their point, the gentlemen withdrew. Scrooge resumed his labours with an
improved opinion of himself, and in a more facetious temper than was usual with
him.
Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened
so, that people ran about with flaring links, proffering their services to go
before horses in carriages, and conduct them on their way. The ancient tower of
a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of
a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and
quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth
were chattering in its frozen head up there. The cold became intense. In the
main street, at the corner of the court, some labourers were repairing the
gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of
ragged men and boys were gathered: warming their hands and winking their eyes
before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug being left in solitude, its
overflowings sullenly congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice. The brightness
of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the
windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers' and grocers' trades
became a splendid joke: a glorious pageant, with which it was next to
impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had
anything to do. The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House,
gave orders to his fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor's
household should; and even the little tailor, whom he had fined five shillings
on the previous Monday for being drunk and bloodthirsty in the streets, stirred
up to-morrow's pudding in his garret, while his lean wife and the baby sallied
out to buy the beef.
Foggier yet, and colder. Piercing,
searching, biting cold. If the good Saint Dunstan had but nipped the Evil
Spirit's nose with a touch of such weather as that, instead of using his
familiar weapons, then indeed he would have roared to lusty purpose. The owner
of one scant young nose, gnawed and mumbled by the hungry cold as bones are
gnawed by dogs, stooped down at Scrooge's keyhole to regale him with a
Christmas carol: but at the first sound of
"God bless you, merry
gentleman!
May nothing you dismay!"
Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy
of action, that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog and
even more congenial frost.
At length the hour of shutting up the
counting-house arrived. With an ill-will Scrooge dismounted from his stool, and
tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerk in the Tank, who instantly
snuffed his candle out, and put on his hat.
"You'll want all day to-morrow, I
suppose?" said Scrooge.
"If quite convenient, sir."
"It's not convenient," said
Scrooge, "and it's not fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you'd
think yourself ill-used, I'll be bound?"
The clerk smiled faintly.
"And yet," said Scrooge,
"you don't think me ill-used, when I pay a day's wages for no work."
The clerk observed that it was only once a
year.
"A poor excuse for picking a man's
pocket every twenty-fifth of December!" said Scrooge, buttoning his
great-coat to the chin. "But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be
here all the earlier next morning."
The clerk promised that he would; and
Scrooge walked out with a growl. The office was closed in a twinkling, and the
clerk, with the long ends of his white comforter dangling below his waist (for
he boasted no great-coat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane
of boys, twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home
to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play at blindman's-buff.
Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his
usual melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and beguiled the
rest of the evening with his banker's-book, went home to bed. He lived in
chambers which had once belonged to his deceased partner. They were a gloomy
suite of rooms, in a lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so
little business to be, that one could scarcely help fancying it must have run
there when it was a young house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses,
and forgotten the way out again. It was old enough now, and dreary enough, for nobody
lived in it but Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices. The yard
was so dark that even Scrooge, who knew its every stone, was fain to grope with
his hands. The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway of the house,
that it seemed as if the Genius of the Weather sat in mournful meditation on
the threshold.
Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing
at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that it was very large.
It is also a fact, that Scrooge had seen it, night and morning, during his
whole residence in that place; also that Scrooge had as little of what is
called fancy about him as any man in the city of London, even including--which
is a bold word--the corporation, aldermen, and livery. Let it also be borne in
mind that Scrooge had not bestowed one thought on Marley, since his last
mention of his seven years' dead partner that afternoon. And then let any man
explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the
lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate
process of change--not a knocker, but Marley's face.
Marley's face. It was not in impenetrable
shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it,
like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked
at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its
ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air;
and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless. That, and
its livid colour, made it horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the
face and beyond its control, rather than a part of its own expression.
As Scrooge looked fixedly at this
phenomenon, it was a knocker again.
To say that he was not startled, or that
his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it had been a
stranger from infancy, would be untrue. But he put his hand upon the key he had
relinquished, turned it sturdily, walked in, and lighted his candle.
He did pause, with a moment's irresolution,
before he shut the door; and he did look cautiously behind it first, as if he
half expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley's pigtail sticking out
into the hall. But there was nothing on the back of the door, except the screws
and nuts that held the knocker on, so he said "Pooh, pooh!" and
closed it with a bang.
The sound resounded through the house like
thunder. Every room above, and every cask in the wine-merchant's cellars below,
appeared to have a separate peal of echoes of its own. Scrooge was not a man to
be frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and walked across the hall, and
up the stairs; slowly too: trimming his candle as he went.
You may talk vaguely about driving a
coach-and-six up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad young Act of
Parliament; but I mean to say you might have got a hearse up that staircase,
and taken it broadwise, with the splinter-bar towards the wall and the door
towards the balustrades: and done it easy. There was plenty of width for that,
and room to spare; which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge thought he saw a
locomotive hearse going on before him in the gloom. Half-a-dozen gas-lamps out
of the street wouldn't have lighted the entry too well, so you may suppose that
it was pretty dark with Scrooge's dip.
Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for
that. Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it. But before he shut his heavy
door, he walked through his rooms to see that all was right. He had just enough
recollection of the face to desire to do that.
Sitting-room, bedroom, lumber-room. All as
they should be. Nobody under the table, nobody under the sofa; a small fire in
the grate; spoon and basin ready; and the little saucepan of gruel (Scrooge had
a cold in his head) upon the hob. Nobody under the bed; nobody in the closet;
nobody in his dressing-gown, which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude
against the wall. Lumber-room as usual. Old fire-guard, old shoes, two
fish-baskets, washing-stand on three legs, and a poker.
Quite satisfied, he closed his door, and
locked himself in; double-locked himself in, which was not his custom. Thus
secured against surprise, he took off his cravat; put on his dressing-gown and
slippers, and his nightcap; and sat down before the fire to take his gruel.
It was a very low fire indeed; nothing on
such a bitter night. He was obliged to sit close to it, and brood over it,
before he could extract the least sensation of warmth from such a handful of
fuel. The fireplace was an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, and
paved all round with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures.
There were Cains and Abels, Pharaoh's daughters; Queens of Sheba, Angelic
messengers descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams,
Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats, hundreds of figures
to attract his thoughts; and yet that face of Marley, seven years dead, came
like the ancient Prophet's rod, and swallowed up the whole. If each smooth tile
had been a blank at first, with power to shape some picture on its surface from
the disjointed fragments of his thoughts, there would have been a copy of old
Marley's head on every one.
"Humbug!" said Scrooge; and
walked across the room.
After several turns, he sat down again. As
he threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened to rest upon a bell, a
disused bell, that hung in the room, and communicated for some purpose now
forgotten with a chamber in the highest story of the building. It was with
great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked,
he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it
scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell in
the house.
This might have lasted half a minute, or a
minute, but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had begun, together.
They were succeeded by a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person
were dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the wine-merchant's cellar.
Scrooge then remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were
described as dragging chains.
The cellar-door flew open with a booming
sound, and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below; then
coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his door.
"It's humbug still!" said
Scrooge. "I won't believe it."
His colour changed though, when, without a
pause, it came on through the heavy door, and passed into the room before his
eyes. Upon its coming in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried,
"I know him; Marley's Ghost!" and fell again.
The same face: the very same. Marley in his
pigtail, usual waistcoat, tights and boots; the tassels on the latter
bristling, like his pigtail, and his coat-skirts, and the hair upon his head.
The chain he drew was clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about
him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of
cash-boxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.
His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through
his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind.
Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley
had no bowels, but he had never believed it until now.
No, nor did he believe it even now. Though
he looked the phantom through and through, and saw it standing before him;
though he felt the chilling influence of its death-cold eyes; and marked the
very texture of the folded kerchief bound about its head and chin, which
wrapper he had not observed before; he was still incredulous, and fought
against his senses.
"How now!" said Scrooge, caustic
and cold as ever. "What do you want with me?"
"Much!"--Marley's voice, no doubt
about it.
"Who are you?"
"Ask me who I was."
"Who were you then?" said
Scrooge, raising his voice. "You're particular, for a shade." He was
going to say "to a shade," but substituted this, as more appropriate.
"In life I was your partner, Jacob
Marley."
"Can you--can you sit down?"
asked Scrooge, looking doubtfully at him.
"I can."
"Do it, then."
Scrooge asked the question, because he
didn't know whether a ghost so transparent might find himself in a condition to
take a chair; and felt that in the event of its being impossible, it might
involve the necessity of an embarrassing explanation. But the ghost sat down on
the opposite side of the fireplace, as if he were quite used to it.
"You don't believe in me,"
observed the Ghost.
"I don't," said Scrooge.
"What evidence would you have of my
reality beyond that of your senses?"
"I don't know," said Scrooge.
"Why do you doubt your senses?"
"Because," said Scrooge, "a
little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats.
You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a
fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you,
whatever you are!"
Scrooge was not much in the habit of
cracking jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means waggish then. The
truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own
attention, and keeping down his terror; for the spectre's voice disturbed the
very marrow in his bones.
To sit, staring at those fixed glazed eyes,
in silence for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him.
There was something very awful, too, in the spectre's being provided with an
infernal atmosphere of its own. Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was
clearly the case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and
skirts, and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapour from an oven.
"You see this toothpick?" said
Scrooge, returning quickly to the charge, for the reason just assigned; and
wishing, though it were only for a second, to divert the vision's stony gaze
from himself.
"I do," replied the Ghost.
"You are not looking at it," said
Scrooge.
"But I see it," said the Ghost,
"notwithstanding."
"Well!" returned Scrooge, "I
have but to swallow this, and be for the rest of my days persecuted by a legion
of goblins, all of my own creation. Humbug, I tell you! humbug!"
At this the spirit raised a frightful cry,
and shook its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held
on tight to his chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon. But how much
greater was his horror, when the phantom taking off the bandage round its head,
as if it were too warm to wear indoors, its lower jaw dropped down upon its
breast!
Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped
his hands before his face.
"Mercy!" he said. "Dreadful
apparition, why do you trouble me?"
"Man of the worldly mind!"
replied the Ghost, "do you believe in me or not?"
"I do," said Scrooge. "I
must. But why do spirits walk the earth, and why do they come to me?"
"It is required of every man,"
the Ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among
his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in
life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the
world--oh, woe is me!--and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared
on earth, and turned to happiness!"
Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook
its chain and wrung its shadowy hands.
"You are fettered," said Scrooge,
trembling. "Tell me why?"
"I wear the chain I forged in
life," replied the Ghost. "I made it link by link, and yard by yard;
I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its
pattern strange to you?"
Scrooge trembled more and more.
"Or would you know," pursued the
Ghost, "the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was
full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured
on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!"
Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in
the expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty or sixty fathoms of
iron cable: but he could see nothing.
"Jacob," he said, imploringly.
"Old Jacob Marley, tell me more. Speak comfort to me, Jacob!"
"I have none to give," the Ghost
replied. "It comes from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed
by other ministers, to other kinds of men. Nor can I tell you what I would. A
very little more is all permitted to me. I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I cannot
linger anywhere. My spirit never walked beyond our counting-house--mark me!--in
life my spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our money-changing hole;
and weary journeys lie before me!"
It was a habit with Scrooge, whenever he
became thoughtful, to put his hands in his breeches pockets. Pondering on what
the Ghost had said, he did so now, but without lifting up his eyes, or getting
off his knees.
"You must have been very slow about
it, Jacob," Scrooge observed, in a business-like manner, though with
humility and deference.
"Slow!" the Ghost repeated.
"Seven years dead," mused
Scrooge. "And travelling all the time!"
"The whole time," said the Ghost.
"No rest, no peace. Incessant torture of remorse."
"You travel fast?" said Scrooge.
"On the wings of the wind,"
replied the Ghost.
"You might have got over a great
quantity of ground in seven years," said Scrooge.
The Ghost, on hearing this, set up another
cry, and clanked its chain so hideously in the dead silence of the night, that
the Ward would have been justified in indicting it for a nuisance.
"Oh! captive, bound, and
double-ironed," cried the phantom, "not to know, that ages of
incessant labour by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity
before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that
any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be,
will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to
know that no space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity
misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!"
"But you were always a good man of
business, Jacob," faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to
himself.
"Business!" cried the Ghost,
wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business. The common welfare was
my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my
business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the
comprehensive ocean of my business!"
It held up its chain at arm's length, as if
that were the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it heavily upon the
ground again.
"At this time of the rolling
year," the spectre said, "I suffer most. Why did I walk through
crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that
blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes
to which its light would have conducted me!"
Scrooge was very much dismayed to hear the
spectre going on at this rate, and began to quake exceedingly.
"Hear me!" cried the Ghost.
"My time is nearly gone."
"I will," said Scrooge. "But
don't be hard upon me! Don't be flowery, Jacob! Pray!"
"How it is that I appear before you in
a shape that you can see, I may not tell. I have sat invisible beside you many
and many a day."
It was not an agreeable idea. Scrooge
shivered, and wiped the perspiration from his brow.
"That is no light part of my
penance," pursued the Ghost. "I am here to-night to warn you, that
you have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A chance and hope of my
procuring, Ebenezer."
"You were always a good friend to
me," said Scrooge. "Thank'ee!"
"You will be haunted," resumed
the Ghost, "by Three Spirits."
Scrooge's countenance fell almost as low as
the Ghost's had done.
"Is that the chance and hope you
mentioned, Jacob?" he demanded, in a faltering voice.
"It is."
"I--I think I'd rather not," said
Scrooge.
"Without their visits," said the
Ghost, "you cannot hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the first
to-morrow, when the bell tolls One."
"Couldn't I take 'em all at once, and
have it over, Jacob?" hinted Scrooge.
"Expect the second on the next night
at the same hour. The third upon the next night when the last stroke of Twelve
has ceased to vibrate. Look to see me no more; and look that, for your own
sake, you remember what has passed between us!"
When it had said these words, the spectre
took its wrapper from the table, and bound it round its head, as before.
Scrooge knew this, by the smart sound its teeth made, when the jaws were
brought together by the bandage. He ventured to raise his eyes again, and found
his supernatural visitor confronting him in an erect attitude, with its chain
wound over and about its arm.
The apparition walked backward from him;
and at every step it took, the window raised itself a little, so that when the
spectre reached it, it was wide open.
It beckoned Scrooge to approach, which he
did. When they were within two paces of each other, Marley's Ghost held up its
hand, warning him to come no nearer. Scrooge stopped.
Not so much in obedience, as in surprise
and fear: for on the raising of the hand, he became sensible of confused noises
in the air; incoherent sounds of lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly
sorrowful and self-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment,
joined in the mournful dirge; and floated out upon the bleak, dark night.
Scrooge followed to the window: desperate
in his curiosity. He looked out.
The air was filled with phantoms, wandering
hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of
them wore chains like Marley's Ghost; some few (they might be guilty
governments) were linked together; none were free. Many had been personally
known to Scrooge in their lives. He had been quite familiar with one old ghost,
in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who
cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant, whom
it saw below, upon a door-step. The misery with them all was, clearly, that
they sought to interfere, for good, in human matters, and had lost the power
for ever.
Whether these creatures faded into mist, or
mist enshrouded them, he could not tell. But they and their spirit voices faded
together; and the night became as it had been when he walked home.
Scrooge closed the window, and examined the
door by which the Ghost had entered. It was double-locked, as he had locked it
with his own hands, and the bolts were undisturbed. He tried to say
"Humbug!" but stopped at the first syllable. And being, from the
emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues of the day, or his glimpse of the
Invisible World, or the dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of the
hour, much in need of repose; went straight to bed, without undressing, and
fell asleep upon the instant.
WHEN Scrooge awoke, it was so dark, that
looking out of bed, he could scarcely distinguish the transparent window from
the opaque walls of his chamber. He was endeavouring to pierce the darkness
with his ferret eyes, when the chimes of a neighbouring church struck the four
quarters. So he listened for the hour.
To his great astonishment the heavy bell
went on from six to seven, and from seven to eight, and regularly up to twelve;
then stopped. Twelve! It was past two when he went to bed. The clock was wrong.
An icicle must have got into the works. Twelve!
He touched the spring of his repeater, to
correct this most preposterous clock. Its rapid little pulse beat twelve: and
stopped.
"Why, it isn't possible," said
Scrooge, "that I can have slept through a whole day and far into another
night. It isn't possible that anything has happened to the sun, and this is
twelve at
The idea being an alarming one, he
scrambled out of bed, and groped his way to the window. He was obliged to rub
the frost off with the sleeve of his dressing-gown before he could see
anything; and could see very little then. All he could make out was, that it
was still very foggy and extremely cold, and that there was no noise of people
running to and fro, and making a great stir, as there unquestionably would have
been if night had beaten off bright day, and taken possession of the world.
This was a great relief, because "three days after sight of this First of
Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his order," and so forth, would
have become a mere
Scrooge went to bed again, and thought, and
thought, and thought it over and over and over, and could make nothing of it.
The more he thought, the more perplexed he was; and the more he endeavoured not
to think, the more he thought.
Marley's Ghost bothered him exceedingly.
Every time he resolved within himself, after mature inquiry, that it was all a
dream, his mind flew back again, like a strong spring released, to its first
position, and presented the same problem to be worked all through, "Was it
a dream or not?"
Scrooge lay in this state until the chime
had gone three quarters more, when he remembered, on a sudden, that the Ghost
had warned him of a visitation when the bell tolled one. He resolved to lie
awake until the hour was passed; and, considering that he could no more go to
sleep than go to Heaven, this was perhaps the wisest resolution in his power.
The quarter was so long, that he was more
than once convinced he must have sunk into a doze unconsciously, and missed the
clock. At length it broke upon his listening ear.
"Ding, dong!"
"A quarter past," said Scrooge,
counting.
"Ding, dong!"
"Half-past!" said Scrooge.
"Ding, dong!"
"A quarter to it," said Scrooge.
"Ding, dong!"
"The hour itself," said Scrooge,
triumphantly, "and nothing else!"
He spoke before the hour bell sounded,
which it now did with a deep, dull, hollow, melancholy ONE. Light flashed up in
the room upon the instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn.
The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I
tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his
back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains of his bed were
drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found
himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it
as I am now to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.
It was a strange figure--like a child: yet
not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural
medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view, and
being diminished to a child's proportions. Its hair, which hung about its neck
and down its back, was white as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle
in it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were very long and
muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength. Its
legs and feet, most delicately formed, were, like those upper members, bare. It
wore a tunic of the purest white; and round its waist was bound a lustrous
belt, the sheen of which was beautiful. It held a branch of fresh green holly
in its hand; and, in singular contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its
dress trimmed with summer flowers. But the strangest thing about it was, that
from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear jet of light, by which
all this was visible; and which was doubtless the occasion of its using, in its
duller moments, a great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its
arm.
Even this, though, when Scrooge looked at
it with increasing steadiness, was not its strangest quality. For as its belt
sparkled and glittered now in one part and now in another, and what was light
one instant, at another time was dark, so the figure itself fluctuated in its
distinctness: being now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty
legs, now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a body: of which
dissolving parts, no outline would be visible in the dense gloom wherein they
melted away. And in the very wonder of this, it would be itself again; distinct
and clear as ever.
"Are you the Spirit, sir, whose coming
was foretold to me?" asked Scrooge.
"I am!"
The voice was soft and gentle. Singularly
low, as if instead of being so close beside him, it were at a distance.
"Who, and what are you?" Scrooge
demanded.
"I am the Ghost of Christmas
Past."
"Long Past?" inquired Scrooge:
observant of its dwarfish stature.
"No. Your past."
Perhaps, Scrooge could not have told
anybody why, if anybody could have asked him; but he had a special desire to
see the Spirit in his cap; and begged him to be covered.
"What!" exclaimed the Ghost,
"would you so soon put out, with worldly hands, the light I give? Is it
not enough that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, and force me
through whole trains of years to wear it low upon my brow!"
Scrooge reverently disclaimed all intention
to offend or any knowledge of having wilfully "bonneted" the Spirit
at any period of his life. He then made bold to inquire what business brought
him there.
"Your welfare!" said the Ghost.
Scrooge expressed himself much obliged, but
could not help thinking that a night of unbroken rest would have been more
conducive to that end. The Spirit must have heard him thinking, for it said
immediately:
"Your reclamation, then. Take
heed!"
It put out its strong hand as it spoke, and
clasped him gently by the arm.
"Rise! and walk with me!"
It would have been in vain for Scrooge to
plead that the weather and the hour were not adapted to pedestrian purposes;
that bed was warm, and the thermometer a long way below freezing; that he was
clad but lightly in his slippers, dressing-gown, and nightcap; and that he had
a cold upon him at that time. The grasp, though gentle as a woman's hand, was
not to be resisted. He rose: but finding that the Spirit made towards the
window, clasped his robe in supplication.
"I am a mortal," Scrooge
remonstrated, "and liable to fall."
"Bear but a touch of my hand
there," said the Spirit, laying it upon his heart, "and you shall be
upheld in more than this!"
As the words were spoken, they passed
through the wall, and stood upon an open country road, with fields on either
hand. The city had entirely vanished. Not a vestige of it was to be seen. The
darkness and the mist had vanished with it, for it was a clear, cold, winter day,
with snow upon the ground.
"Good Heaven!" said Scrooge,
clasping his hands together, as he looked about him. "I was bred in this
place. I was a boy here!"
The Spirit gazed upon him mildly. Its
gentle touch, though it had been light and instantaneous, appeared still
present to the old man's sense of feeling. He was conscious of a thousand
odours floating in the air, each one connected with a thousand thoughts, and
hopes, and joys, and cares long, long, forgotten!
"Your lip is trembling," said the
Ghost. "And what is that upon your cheek?"
Scrooge muttered, with an unusual catching
in his voice, that it was a pimple; and begged the Ghost to lead him where he
would.
"You recollect the way?" inquired
the Spirit.
"Remember it!" cried Scrooge with
fervour; "I could walk it blindfold."
"Strange to have forgotten it for so
many years!" observed the Ghost. "Let us go on."
They walked along the road, Scrooge
recognising every gate, and post, and tree; until a little market-town appeared
in the distance, with its bridge, its church, and winding river. Some shaggy
ponies now were seen trotting towards them with boys upon their backs, who
called to other boys in country gigs and carts, driven by farmers. All these
boys were in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the broad fields
were so full of merry music, that the crisp air laughed to hear it!
"These are but shadows of the things
that have been," said the Ghost. "They have no consciousness of
us."
The jocund travellers came on; and as they
came, Scrooge knew and named them every one. Why was he rejoiced beyond all
bounds to see them! Why did his cold eye glisten, and his heart leap up as they
went past! Why was he filled with gladness when he heard them give each other
Merry Christmas, as they parted at cross-roads and bye-ways, for their several
homes! What was merry Christmas to Scrooge? Out upon merry Christmas! What good
had it ever done to him?
"The school is not quite
deserted," said the Ghost. "A solitary child, neglected by his
friends, is left there still."
Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed.
They left the high-road, by a
well-remembered lane, and soon approached a mansion of dull red brick, with a
little weathercock-surmounted cupola, on the roof, and a bell hanging in it. It
was a large house, but one of broken fortunes; for the spacious offices were
little used, their walls were damp and mossy, their windows broken, and their
gates decayed. Fowls clucked and strutted in the stables; and the coach-houses
and sheds were over-run with grass. Nor was it more retentive of its ancient
state, within; for entering the dreary hall, and glancing through the open
doors of many rooms, they found them poorly furnished, cold, and vast. There
was an earthy savour in the air, a chilly bareness in the place, which
associated itself somehow with too much getting up by candle-light, and not too
much to eat.
They went, the Ghost and Scrooge, across
the hall, to a door at the back of the house. It opened before them, and
disclosed a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still by lines of plain
deal forms and desks. At one of these a lonely boy was reading near a feeble
fire; and Scrooge sat down upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self
as he used to be.
Not a latent echo in the house, not a squeak
and scuffle from the mice behind the panelling, not a drip from the half-thawed
water-spout in the dull yard behind, not a sigh among the leafless boughs of
one despondent poplar, not the idle swinging of an empty store-house door, no,
not a clicking in the fire, but fell upon the heart of Scrooge with a softening
influence, and gave a freer passage to his tears.
The Spirit touched him on the arm, and
pointed to his younger self, intent upon his reading. Suddenly a man, in
foreign garments: wonderfully real and distinct to look at: stood outside the
window, with an axe stuck in his belt, and leading by the bridle an ass laden
with wood.
"Why, it's Ali Baba!" Scrooge
exclaimed in ecstasy. "It's dear old honest Ali Baba! Yes, yes, I know!
One Christmas time, when yonder solitary child was left here all alone, he did
come, for the first time, just like that. Poor boy! And Valentine," said
Scrooge, "and his wild brother, Orson; there they go! And what's his name,
who was put down in his drawers, asleep, at the Gate of Damascus; don't you see
him! And the Sultan's Groom turned upside down by the Genii; there he is upon
his head! Serve him right. I'm glad of it. What business had he to be married
to the Princess!"
To hear Scrooge expending all the
earnestness of his nature on such subjects, in a most extraordinary voice
between laughing and crying; and to see his heightened and excited face; would
have been a surprise to his business friends in the city, indeed.
"There's the Parrot!" cried
Scrooge. "Green body and yellow tail, with a thing like a lettuce growing
out of the top of his head; there he is! Poor Robin Crusoe, he called him, when
he came home again after sailing round the island. 'Poor Robin Crusoe, where
have you been, Robin Crusoe?' The man thought he was dreaming, but he wasn't.
It was the Parrot, you know. There goes Friday, running for his life to the
little creek! Halloa! Hoop! Halloo!"
Then, with a rapidity of transition very
foreign to his usual character, he said, in pity for his former self, "Poor
boy!" and cried again.
"I wish," Scrooge muttered,
putting his hand in his pocket, and looking about him, after drying his eyes
with his cuff: "but it's too late now."
"What is the matter?" asked the
Spirit.
"Nothing," said Scrooge.
"Nothing. There was a boy singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night.
I should like to have given him something: that's all."
The Ghost smiled thoughtfully, and waved
its hand: saying as it did so, "Let us see another Christmas!"
Scrooge's former self grew larger at the
words, and the room became a little darker and more dirty. The panels shrunk,
the windows cracked; fragments of plaster fell out of the ceiling, and the
naked laths were shown instead; but how all this was brought about, Scrooge
knew no more than you do. He only knew that it was quite correct; that
everything had happened so; that there he was, alone again, when all the other
boys had gone home for the jolly holidays.
He was not reading now, but walking up and
down despairingly. Scrooge looked at the Ghost, and with a mournful shaking of
his head, glanced anxiously towards the door.
It opened; and a little girl, much younger
than the boy, came darting in, and putting her arms about his neck, and often
kissing him, addressed him as her "Dear, dear brother."
"I have come to bring you home, dear
brother!" said the child, clapping her tiny hands, and bending down to
laugh. "To bring you home, home, home!"
"Home, little Fan?" returned the
boy.
"Yes!" said the child, brimful of
glee. "Home, for good and all. Home, for ever and ever. Father is so much
kinder than he used to be, that home's like Heaven! He spoke so gently to me
one dear night when I was going to bed, that I was not afraid to ask him once
more if you might come home; and he said Yes, you should; and sent me in a
coach to bring you. And you're to be a man!" said the child, opening her
eyes, "and are never to come back here; but first, we're to be together
all the Christmas long, and have the merriest time in all the world."
"You are quite a woman, little
Fan!" exclaimed the boy.
She clapped her hands and laughed, and
tried to touch his head; but being too little, laughed again, and stood on
tiptoe to embrace him. Then she began to drag him, in her childish eagerness,
towards the door; and he, nothing loth to go, accompanied her.
A terrible voice in the hall cried,
"Bring down Master Scrooge's box, there!" and in the hall appeared
the schoolmaster himself, who glared on Master Scrooge with a ferocious
condescension, and threw him into a dreadful state of mind by shaking hands
with him. He then conveyed him and his sister into the veriest old well of a
shivering best-parlour that ever was seen, where the maps upon the wall, and
the celestial and terrestrial globes in the windows, were waxy with cold. Here
he produced a decanter of curiously light wine, and a block of curiously heavy
cake, and administered instalments of those dainties to the young people: at
the same time, sending out a meagre servant to offer a glass of
"something" to the postboy, who answered that he thanked the
gentleman, but if it was the same tap as he had tasted before, he had rather
not. Master Scrooge's trunk being by this time tied on to the top of the
chaise, the children bade the schoolmaster good-bye right willingly; and
getting into it, drove gaily down the garden-sweep: the quick wheels dashing
the hoar-frost and snow from off the dark leaves of the evergreens like spray.
"Always a delicate creature, whom a
breath might have withered," said the Ghost. "But she had a large
heart!"
"So she had," cried Scrooge.
"You're right. I will not gainsay it, Spirit. God forbid!"
"She died a woman," said the
Ghost, "and had, as I think, children."
"One child," Scrooge returned.
"True," said the Ghost.
"Your nephew!"
Scrooge seemed uneasy in his mind; and
answered briefly, "Yes."
Although they had but that moment left the
school behind them, they were now in the busy thoroughfares of a city, where
shadowy passengers passed and repassed; where shadowy carts and coaches battled
for the way, and all the strife and tumult of a real city were. It was made
plain enough, by the dressing of the shops, that here too it was Christmas time
again; but it was evening, and the streets were lighted up.
The Ghost stopped at a certain warehouse
door, and asked Scrooge if he knew it.
"Know it!" said Scrooge.
"Was I apprenticed here!"
They went in. At sight of an old gentleman
in a Welsh wig, sitting behind such a high desk, that if he had been two inches
taller he must have knocked his head against the ceiling, Scrooge cried in
great excitement:
"Why, it's old Fezziwig! Bless his
heart; it's Fezziwig alive again!"
Old Fezziwig laid down his pen, and looked
up at the clock, which pointed to the hour of seven. He rubbed his hands;
adjusted his capacious waistcoat; laughed all over himself, from his shoes to
his organ of benevolence; and called out in a comfortable, oily, rich, fat,
jovial voice:
"Yo ho, there! Ebenezer! Dick!"
Scrooge's former self, now grown a young
man, came briskly in, accompanied by his fellow-'prentice.
"Dick Wilkins, to be sure!" said
Scrooge to the Ghost. "Bless me, yes. There he is. He was very much
attached to me, was Dick. Poor Dick! Dear, dear!"
"Yo ho, my boys!" said Fezziwig.
"No more work to-night. Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer! Let's
have the shutters up," cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap of his hands,
"before a man can say Jack Robinson!"
You wouldn't believe how those two fellows
went at it! They charged into the street with the shutters--one, two, three--had
'em up in their places--four, five, six--barred 'em and pinned 'em--seven,
eight, nine--and came back before you could have got to twelve, panting like
race-horses.
"Hilli-ho!" cried old Fezziwig,
skipping down from the high desk, with wonderful agility. "Clear away, my
lads, and let's have lots of room here! Hilli-ho, Dick! Chirrup,
Ebenezer!"
Clear away! There was nothing they wouldn't
have cleared away, or couldn't have cleared away, with old Fezziwig looking on.
It was done in a minute. Every movable was packed off, as if it were dismissed
from public life for evermore; the floor was swept and watered, the lamps were
trimmed, fuel was heaped upon the fire; and the warehouse was as snug, and
warm, and dry, and bright a ball-room, as you would desire to see upon a
winter's night.
In came a fiddler with a music-book, and
went up to the lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty
stomach-aches. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile. In came the
three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and lovable. In came the six young followers
whose hearts they broke. In came all the young men and women employed in the
business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the baker. In came the cook,
with her brother's particular friend, the milkman. In came the boy from over
the way, who was suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying
to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who was proved to have
had her ears pulled by her mistress. In they all came, one after another; some
shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some
pulling; in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went, twenty
couple at once; hands half round and back again the other way; down the middle
and up again; round and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old
top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top couple starting off
again, as soon as they got there; all top couples at last, and not a bottom one
to help them! When this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his
hands to stop the dance, cried out, "Well done!" and the fiddler
plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially provided for that
purpose. But scorning rest, upon his reappearance, he instantly began again, though
there were no dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home,
exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a bran-new man resolved to beat him out of
sight, or perish.
There were more dances, and there were
forfeits, and more dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there
was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled,
and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the
evening came after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind!
The sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told it
him!) struck up "Sir Roger de Coverley." Then old Fezziwig stood out
to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work
cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were
not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no notion of walking.
But if they had been twice as many--ah,
four times--old Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would Mrs.
Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be his partner in every sense of the
term. If that's not high praise, tell me higher, and I'll use it. A positive
light appeared to issue from Fezziwig's calves. They shone in every part of the
dance like moons. You couldn't have predicted, at any given time, what would
have become of them next. And when old Fezziwig and Mrs. Fezziwig had gone all
through the dance; advance and retire, both hands to your partner, bow and
curtsey, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to your place; Fezziwig
"cut"--cut so deftly, that he appeared to wink with his legs, and
came upon his feet again without a stagger.
When the clock struck eleven, this domestic
ball broke up. Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig took their stations, one on either side of
the door, and shaking hands with every person individually as he or she went
out, wished him or her a Merry Christmas. When everybody had retired but the
two 'prentices, they did the same to them; and thus the cheerful voices died
away, and the lads were left to their beds; which were under a counter in the
back-shop.
During the whole of this time, Scrooge had
acted like a man out of his wits. His heart and soul were in the scene, and
with his former self. He corroborated everything, remembered everything, enjoyed
everything, and underwent the strangest agitation. It was not until now, when
the bright faces of his former self and Dick were turned from them, that he
remembered the Ghost, and became conscious that it was looking full upon him,
while the light upon its head burnt very clear.
"A small matter," said the Ghost,
"to make these silly folks so full of gratitude."
"Small!" echoed Scrooge.
The Spirit signed to him to listen to the
two apprentices, who were pouring out their hearts in praise of Fezziwig: and
when he had done so, said,
"Why! Is it not? He has spent but a
few pounds of your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so much that he
deserves this praise?"
"It isn't that," said Scrooge,
heated by the remark, and speaking unconsciously like his former, not his
latter, self. "It isn't that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy
or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil. Say
that his power lies in words and looks; in things so slight and insignificant that
it is impossible to add and count 'em up: what then? The happiness he gives, is
quite as great as if it cost a fortune."
He felt the Spirit's glance, and stopped.
"What is the matter?" asked the
Ghost.
"Nothing particular," said
Scrooge.
"Something, I think?" the Ghost
insisted.
"No," said Scrooge, "No. I
should like to be able to say a word or two to my clerk just now. That's
all."
His former self turned down the lamps as he
gave utterance to the wish; and Scrooge and the Ghost again stood side by side
in the open air.
"My time grows short," observed
the Spirit. "Quick!"
This was not addressed to Scrooge, or to
any one whom he could see, but it produced an immediate effect. For again
Scrooge saw himself. He was older now; a man in the prime of life. His face had
not the harsh and rigid lines of later years; but it had begun to wear the
signs of care and avarice. There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the
eye, which showed the passion that had taken root, and where the shadow of the
growing tree would fall.
He was not alone, but sat by the side of a
fair young girl in a mourning-dress: in whose eyes there were tears, which
sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of Christmas Past.
"It matters little," she said,
softly. "To you, very little. Another idol has displaced me; and if it can
cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no
just cause to grieve."
"What Idol has displaced you?" he
rejoined.
"A golden one."
"This is the even-handed dealing of
the world!" he said. "There is nothing on which it is so hard as
poverty; and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the
pursuit of wealth!"
"You fear the world too much,"
she answered, gently. "All your other hopes have merged into the hope of
being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your nobler
aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you.
Have I not?"
"What then?" he retorted.
"Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then? I am not changed towards
you."
She shook her head.
"Am I?"
"Our contract is an old one. It was
made when we were both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we
could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You are changed.
When it was made, you were another man."
"I was a boy," he said
impatiently.
"Your own feeling tells you that you
were not what you are," she returned. "I am. That which promised
happiness when we were one in heart, is fraught with misery now that we are
two. How often and how keenly I have thought of this, I will not say. It is
enough that I have thought of it, and can release you."
"Have I ever sought release?"
"In words. No. Never."
"In what, then?"
"In a changed nature; in an altered
spirit; in another atmosphere of life; another Hope as its great end. In
everything that made my love of any worth or value in your sight. If this had
never been between us," said the girl, looking mildly, but with
steadiness, upon him; "tell me, would you seek me out and try to win me
now? Ah, no!"
He seemed to yield to the justice of this
supposition, in spite of himself. But he said with a struggle, "You think
not."
"I would gladly think otherwise if I
could," she answered, "Heaven knows! When I have learned a Truth like
this, I know how strong and irresistible it must be. But if you were free
to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, can even I believe that you would choose a
dowerless girl--you who, in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by
Gain: or, choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your one
guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your repentance and regret would
surely follow? I do; and I release you. With a full heart, for the love of him
you once were."
He was about to speak; but with her head
turned from him, she resumed.
"You may--the memory of what is past
half makes me hope you will--have pain in this. A very, very brief time, and
you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as an unprofitable dream, from
which it happened well that you awoke. May you be happy in the life you have
chosen!"
She left him, and they parted.
"Spirit!" said Scrooge,
"show me no more! Conduct me home. Why do you delight to torture me?"
"One shadow more!" exclaimed the
Ghost.
"No more!" cried Scrooge.
"No more. I don't wish to see it. Show me no more!"
But the relentless Ghost pinioned him in
both his arms, and forced him to observe what happened next.
They were in another scene and place; a
room, not very large or handsome, but full of comfort. Near to the winter fire
sat a beautiful young girl, so like that last that Scrooge believed it was the
same, until he saw her, now a comely matron, sitting opposite her daughter. The
noise in this room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more children
there, than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind could count; and, unlike the
celebrated herd in the poem, they were not forty children conducting themselves
like one, but every child was conducting itself like forty. The consequences
were uproarious beyond belief; but no one seemed to care; on the contrary, the
mother and daughter laughed heartily, and enjoyed it very much; and the latter,
soon beginning to mingle in the sports, got pillaged by the young brigands most
ruthlessly. What would I not have given to be one of them! Though I never could
have been so rude, no, no! I wouldn't for the wealth of all the world have
crushed that braided hair, and torn it down; and for the precious little shoe,
I wouldn't have plucked it off, God bless my soul! to save my life. As to
measuring her waist in sport, as they did, bold young brood, I couldn't have
done it; I should have expected my arm to have grown round it for a punishment,
and never come straight again. And yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to
have touched her lips; to have questioned her, that she might have opened them;
to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush;
to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond
price: in short, I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest
licence of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its value.
But now a knocking at the door was heard,
and such a rush immediately ensued that she with laughing face and plundered
dress was borne towards it the centre of a flushed and boisterous group, just
in time to greet the father, who came home attended by a man laden with
Christmas toys and presents. Then the shouting and the struggling, and the
onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter! The scaling him with chairs
for ladders to dive into his pockets, despoil him of brown-paper parcels, hold
on tight by his cravat, hug him round his neck, pommel his back, and kick his
legs in irrepressible affection! The shouts of wonder and delight with which
the development of every package was received! The terrible announcement that
the baby had been taken in the act of putting a doll's frying-pan into his
mouth, and was more than suspected of having swallowed a fictitious turkey, glued
on a wooden platter! The immense relief of finding this a false alarm! The joy,
and gratitude, and ecstasy! They are all indescribable alike. It is enough that
by degrees the children and their emotions got out of the parlour, and by one
stair at a time, up to the top of the house; where they went to bed, and so
subsided.
And now Scrooge looked on more attentively
than ever, when the master of the house, having his daughter leaning fondly on
him, sat down with her and her mother at his own fireside; and when he thought
that such another creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise, might
have called him father, and been a spring-time in the haggard winter of his
life, his sight grew very dim indeed.
"Belle," said the husband,
turning to his wife with a smile, "I saw an old friend of yours this
afternoon."
"Who was it?"
"Guess!"
"How can I? Tut, don't I know?"
she added in the same breath, laughing as he laughed. "Mr. Scrooge."
"Mr. Scrooge it was. I passed his
office window; and as it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could
scarcely help seeing him. His partner lies upon the point of death, I hear; and
there he sat alone. Quite alone in the world, I do believe."
"Spirit!" said Scrooge in a
broken voice, "remove me from this place."
"I told you these were shadows of the
things that have been," said the Ghost. "That they are what they are,
do not blame me!"
"Remove me!" Scrooge exclaimed,
"I cannot bear it!"
He turned upon the Ghost, and seeing that
it looked upon him with a face, in which in some strange way there were
fragments of all the faces it had shown him, wrestled with it.
"Leave me! Take me back. Haunt me no
longer!"
In the struggle, if that can be called a
struggle in which the Ghost with no visible resistance on its own part was undisturbed
by any effort of its adversary, Scrooge observed that its light was burning
high and bright; and dimly connecting that with its influence over him, he
seized the extinguisher-cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down upon its
head.
The Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the
extinguisher covered its whole form; but though Scrooge pressed it down with
all his force, he could not hide the light: which streamed from under it, in an
unbroken flood upon the ground.
He was conscious of being exhausted, and
overcome by an irresistible drowsiness; and, further, of being in his own
bedroom. He gave the cap a parting squeeze, in which his hand relaxed; and had
barely time to reel to bed, before he sank into a heavy sleep.
AWAKING in the middle of a prodigiously
tough snore, and sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together, Scrooge had no
occasion to be told that the bell was again upon the stroke of One. He felt
that he was restored to consciousness in the right nick of time, for the
especial purpose of holding a conference with the second messenger despatched
to him through Jacob Marley's intervention. But finding that he turned
uncomfortably cold when he began to wonder which of his curtains this new
spectre would draw back, he put them every one aside with his own hands; and
lying down again, established a sharp look-out all round the bed. For he wished
to challenge the Spirit on the moment of its appearance, and did not wish to be
taken by surprise, and made nervous.
Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who
plume themselves on being acquainted with a move or two, and being usually
equal to the time-of-day, express the wide range of their capacity for
adventure by observing that they are good for anything from pitch-and-toss to
manslaughter; between which opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably
wide and comprehensive range of subjects. Without venturing for Scrooge quite
as hardily as this, I don't mind calling on you to believe that he was ready for
a good broad field of strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and
rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.
Now, being prepared for almost anything, he
was not by any means prepared for nothing; and, consequently, when the
The moment Scrooge's hand was on the lock,
a strange voice called him by his name, and bade him enter. He obeyed.
It was his own room. There was no doubt
about that. But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls and
ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove; from
every part of which, bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of
holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors
had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney,
as that dull petrification of a hearth had never known in Scrooge's time, or
Marley's, or for many and many a winter season gone. Heaped up on the floor, to
form a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints
of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings,
barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges,
luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made
the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy state upon this couch,
there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to see; who bore a glowing torch, in shape
not unlike Plenty's horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on
Scrooge, as he came peeping round the door.
"Come in!" exclaimed the Ghost.
"Come in! and know me better, man!"
Scrooge entered timidly, and hung his head
before this Spirit. He was not the dogged Scrooge he had been; and though the
Spirit's eyes were clear and kind, he did not like to meet them.
"I am the Ghost of Christmas
Present," said the Spirit. "Look upon me!"
Scrooge reverently did so. It was clothed
in one simple green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung
so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining
to be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the
ample folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other
covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark
brown curls were long and free; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its
open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air.
Girded round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword was in it, and
the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.
"You have never seen the like of me
before!" exclaimed the Spirit.
"Never," Scrooge made answer to
it.
"Have never walked forth with the
younger members of my family; meaning (for I am very young) my elder brothers
born in these later years?" pursued the Phantom.
"I don't think I have," said
Scrooge. "I am afraid I have not. Have you had many brothers,
Spirit?"
"More than eighteen hundred,"
said the Ghost.
"A tremendous family to provide
for!" muttered Scrooge.
The Ghost of Christmas Present rose.
"Spirit," said Scrooge
submissively, "conduct me where you will. I went forth last night on
compulsion, and I learnt a lesson which is working now. To-night, if you have
aught to teach me, let me profit by it."
"Touch my robe!"
Scrooge did as he was told, and held it
fast.
Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy,
turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies,
puddings, fruit, and punch, all vanished instantly. So did the room, the fire,
the ruddy glow, the hour of night, and they stood in the city streets on
Christmas morning, where (for the weather was severe) the people made a rough,
but brisk and not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the
pavement in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of their houses, whence
it was mad delight to the boys to see it come plumping down into the road
below, and splitting into artificial little snow-storms.
The house fronts looked black enough, and
the windows blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow upon the
roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon the ground; which last deposit had been
ploughed up in deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and waggons; furrows that
crossed and re-crossed each other hundreds of times where the great streets
branched off; and made intricate channels, hard to trace in the thick yellow
mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy, and the shortest streets were choked up
with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended
in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain had, by one
consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear hearts' content.
There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet was there
an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest summer
sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.
For, the people who were shovelling away on
the housetops were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another from the
parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball--better-natured
missile far than many a wordy jest-- laughing heartily if it went right and not
less heartily if it went wrong. The poulterers' shops were still half open, and
the fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round,
pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old
gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their
apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish
Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking
from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced
demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high
in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers'
benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water
gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown,
recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant
shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins,
squat and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in
the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and
beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner. The very
gold and silver fish, set forth among these choice fruits in a bowl, though
members of a dull and stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was
something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and round their little
world in slow and passionless excitement.
The Grocers'! oh, the Grocers'! nearly
closed, with perhaps two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such
glimpses! It was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a
merry sound, or that the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that
the canisters were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the
blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the
raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks
of cinnamon so long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied
fruits so caked and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on
feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were moist and
pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in modest tartness from their
highly-decorated boxes, or that everything was good to eat and in its Christmas
dress; but the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful
promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other at the door,
crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left their purchases upon the
counter, and came running back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of the
like mistakes, in the best humour possible; while the Grocer and his people
were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which they fastened their
aprons behind might have been their own, worn outside for general inspection,
and for Christmas daws to peck at if they chose.
But soon the steeples called good people
all, to church and chapel, and away they came, flocking through the streets in
their best clothes, and with their gayest faces. And at the same time there
emerged from scores of bye-streets, lanes, and nameless turnings, innumerable
people, carrying their dinners to the bakers' shops. The sight of these poor
revellers appeared to interest the Spirit very much, for he stood with Scrooge
beside him in a baker's doorway, and taking off the covers as their bearers
passed, sprinkled incense on their dinners from his torch. And it was a very
uncommon kind of torch, for once or twice when there were angry words between
some dinner-carriers who had jostled each other, he shed a few drops of water
on them from it, and their good humour was restored directly. For they said, it
was a shame to quarrel upon Christmas Day. And so it was! God love it, so it
was!
In time the bells ceased, and the bakers
were shut up; and yet there was a genial shadowing forth of all these dinners
and the progress of their cooking, in the thawed blotch of wet above each
baker's oven; where the pavement smoked as if its stones were cooking too.
"Is there a peculiar flavour in what
you sprinkle from your torch?" asked Scrooge.
"There is. My own."
"Would it apply to any kind of dinner
on this day?" asked Scrooge.
"To any kindly given. To a poor one
most."
"Why to a poor one most?" asked
Scrooge.
"Because it needs it most."
"Spirit," said Scrooge, after a
moment's thought, "I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds
about us, should desire to cramp these people's opportunities of innocent
enjoyment."
"I!" cried the Spirit.
"You would deprive them of their means
of dining every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to
dine at all," said Scrooge. "Wouldn't you?"
"I!" cried the Spirit.
"You seek to close these places on the
Seventh Day?" said Scrooge. "And it comes to the same thing."
"I seek!" exclaimed the Spirit.
"Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been
done in your name, or at least in that of your family," said Scrooge.
"There are some upon this earth of
yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do
their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness
in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had
never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not
us."
Scrooge promised that he would; and they
went on, invisible, as they had been before, into the suburbs of the town. It
was a remarkable quality of the Ghost (which Scrooge had observed at the
baker's), that notwithstanding his gigantic size, he could accommodate himself
to any place with ease; and that he stood beneath a low roof quite as
gracefully and like a supernatural creature, as it was possible he could have
done in any lofty hall.
And perhaps it was the pleasure the good
Spirit had in showing off this power of his, or else it was his own kind,
generous, hearty nature, and his sympathy with all poor men, that led him
straight to Scrooge's clerk's; for there he went, and took Scrooge with him,
holding to his robe; and on the threshold of the door the Spirit smiled, and
stopped to bless Bob Cratchit's dwelling with the sprinkling of his torch.
Think of that! Bob had but fifteen "Bob" a-week himself; he pocketed
on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his Christian name; and yet the Ghost of
Christmas Present blessed his four-roomed house!
Then up rose Mrs. Cratchit, Cratchit's
wife, dressed out but poorly in a twice-turned gown, but brave in ribbons,
which are cheap and make a goodly show for sixpence; and she laid the cloth,
assisted by Belinda Cratchit, second of her daughters, also brave in ribbons;
while Master Peter Cratchit plunged a fork into the saucepan of potatoes, and
getting the corners of his monstrous shirt collar (Bob's private property,
conferred upon his son and heir in honour of the day) into his mouth, rejoiced
to find himself so gallantly attired, and yearned to show his linen in the
fashionable Parks. And now two smaller Cratchits, boy and girl, came tearing
in, screaming that outside the baker's they had smelt the goose, and known it
for their own; and basking in luxurious thoughts of sage and onion, these young
Cratchits danced about the table, and exalted Master Peter Cratchit to the
skies, while he (not proud, although his collars nearly choked him) blew the
fire, until the slow potatoes bubbling up, knocked loudly at the saucepan-lid
to be let out and peeled.
"What has ever got your precious
father then?" said Mrs. Cratchit. "And your brother, Tiny Tim! And
Martha warn't as late last Christmas Day by half-an-hour?"
"Here's Martha, mother!" said a
girl, appearing as she spoke.
"Here's Martha, mother!" cried
the two young Cratchits. "Hurrah! There's such a goose, Martha!"
"Why, bless your heart alive, my dear,
how late you are!" said Mrs. Cratchit, kissing her a dozen times, and
taking off her shawl and bonnet for her with officious zeal.
"We'd a deal of work to finish up last
night," replied the girl, "and had to clear away this morning,
mother!"
"Well! Never mind so long as you are
come," said Mrs. Cratchit. "Sit ye down before the fire, my dear, and
have a warm, Lord bless ye!"
"No, no! There's father coming,"
cried the two young Cratchits, who were everywhere at once. "Hide, Martha,
hide!"
So Martha hid herself, and in came little
Bob, the father, with at least three feet of comforter exclusive of the fringe,
hanging down before him; and his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed, to
look seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a
little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame!
"Why, where's our Martha?" cried
Bob Cratchit, looking round.
"Not coming," said Mrs. Cratchit.
"Not coming!" said Bob, with a
sudden declension in his high spirits; for he had been Tim's blood horse all
the way from church, and had come home rampant. "Not coming upon Christmas
Day!"
Martha didn't like to see him disappointed,
if it were only in joke; so she came out prematurely from behind the closet
door, and ran into his arms, while the two young Cratchits hustled Tiny Tim,
and bore him off into the wash-house, that he might hear the pudding singing in
the copper.
"And how did little Tim behave?"
asked Mrs. Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had
hugged his daughter to his heart's content.
"As good as gold," said Bob,
"and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and
thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he
hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might
be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk,
and blind men see."
Bob's voice was tremulous when he told them
this, and trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing strong and
hearty.
His active little crutch was heard upon the
floor, and back came Tiny Tim before another word was spoken, escorted by his
brother and sister to his stool before the fire; and while Bob, turning up his
cuffs--as if, poor fellow, they were capable of being made more
shabby--compounded some hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and stirred
it round and round and put it on the hob to simmer; Master Peter, and the two
ubiquitous young Cratchits went to fetch the goose, with which they soon
returned in high procession.
Such a bustle ensued that you might have
thought a goose the rarest of all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a
black swan was a matter of course--and in truth it was something very like it
in that house. Mrs. Cratchit made the gravy (ready beforehand in a little
saucepan) hissing hot; Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigour;
Miss Belinda sweetened up the apple-sauce; Martha dusted the hot plates; Bob
took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny corner at the table; the two young Cratchits
set chairs for everybody, not forgetting themselves, and mounting guard upon
their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest they should shriek for
goose before their turn came to be helped. At last the dishes were set on, and
grace was said. It was succeeded by a breathless pause, as Mrs. Cratchit,
looking slowly all along the carving-knife, prepared to plunge it in the
breast; but when she did, and when the long expected gush of stuffing issued
forth, one murmur of delight arose all round the board, and even Tiny Tim,
excited by the two young Cratchits, beat on the table with the handle of his
knife, and feebly cried Hurrah!
There never was such a goose. Bob said he
didn't believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour,
size and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by
apple-sauce and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole
family; indeed, as Mrs. Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small
atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn't ate it all at last! Yet every one
had had enough, and the youngest Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage
and onion to the eyebrows! But now, the plates being changed by Miss Belinda,
Mrs. Cratchit left the room alone--too nervous to bear witnesses--to take the
pudding up and bring it in.
Suppose it should not be done enough!
Suppose it should break in turning out! Suppose somebody should have got over
the wall of the back-yard, and stolen it, while they were merry with the
goose--a supposition at which the two young Cratchits became livid! All sorts
of horrors were supposed.
Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding
was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell
like an eating-house and a pastrycook's next door to each other, with a
laundress's next door to that! That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs.
Cratchit entered--flushed, but smiling proudly--with the pudding, like a
speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of
ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.
Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said,
and calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs.
Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs. Cratchit said that now the weight was off
her mind, she would confess she had had her doubts about the quantity of flour.
Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at
all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do
so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.
At last the dinner was all done, the cloth
was cleared, the hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the jug
being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges were put upon the
table, and a shovel-full of chestnuts on the fire. Then all the Cratchit family
drew round the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a
one; and at Bob Cratchit's elbow stood the family display of glass. Two
tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle.
These held the hot stuff from the jug,
however, as well as golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with
beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily.
Then Bob proposed:
"A Merry Christmas to us all, my
dears. God bless us!"
Which all the family re-echoed.
"God bless us every one!" said
Tiny Tim, the last of all.
He sat very close to his father's side upon
his little stool. Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the
child, and wished to keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken
from him.
"Spirit," said Scrooge, with an
interest he had never felt before, "tell me if Tiny Tim will live."
"I see a vacant seat," replied
the Ghost, "in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner,
carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child
will die."
"No, no," said Scrooge. "Oh,
no, kind Spirit! say he will be spared."
"If these shadows remain unaltered by
the Future, none other of my race," returned the Ghost, "will find
him here. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease
the surplus population."
Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words
quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.
"Man," said the Ghost, "if
man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have
discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall
live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more
worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh
God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his
hungry brothers in the dust!"
Scrooge bent before the Ghost's rebuke, and
trembling cast his eyes upon the ground. But he raised them speedily, on
hearing his own name.
"Mr. Scrooge!" said Bob;
"I'll give you Mr. Scrooge, the Founder of the Feast!"
"The Founder of the Feast
indeed!" cried Mrs. Cratchit, reddening. "I wish I had him here. I'd
give him a piece of my mind to feast upon, and I hope he'd have a good appetite
for it."
"My dear," said Bob, "the
children! Christmas Day."
"It should be Christmas Day, I am
sure," said she, "on which one drinks the health of such an odious,
stingy, hard, unfeeling man as Mr. Scrooge. You know he is, Robert! Nobody
knows it better than you do, poor fellow!"
"My dear," was Bob's mild answer,
"Christmas Day."
"I'll drink his health for your sake
and the Day's," said Mrs. Cratchit, "not for his. Long life to him! A
merry Christmas and a happy new year! He'll be very merry and very happy, I
have no doubt!"
The children drank the toast after her. It
was the first of their proceedings which had no heartiness. Tiny Tim drank it
last of all, but he didn't care twopence for it. Scrooge was the Ogre of the
family. The mention of his name cast a dark shadow on the party, which was not
dispelled for full five minutes.
After it had passed away, they were ten
times merrier than before, from the mere relief of Scrooge the Baleful being
done with. Bob Cratchit told them how he had a situation in his eye for Master
Peter, which would bring in, if obtained, full five-and-sixpence weekly. The
two young Cratchits laughed tremendously at the idea of Peter's being a man of
business; and Peter himself looked thoughtfully at the fire from between his
collars, as if he were deliberating what particular investments he should favour
when he came into the receipt of that bewildering income. Martha, who was a
poor apprentice at a milliner's, then told them what kind of work she had to
do, and how many hours she worked at a stretch, and how she meant to lie abed
to-morrow morning for a good long rest; to-morrow being a holiday she passed at
home. Also how she had seen a countess and a lord some days before, and how the
lord "was much about as tall as Peter;" at which Peter pulled up his
collars so high that you couldn't have seen his head if you had been there. All
this time the chestnuts and the jug went round and round; and by-and-bye they
had a song, about a lost child travelling in the snow, from Tiny Tim, who had a
plaintive little voice, and sang it very well indeed.
There was nothing of high mark in this.
They were not a handsome family; they were not well dressed; their shoes were
far from being water-proof; their clothes were scanty; and Peter might have
known, and very likely did, the inside of a pawnbroker's. But, they were happy,
grateful, pleased with one another, and contented with the time; and when they
faded, and looked happier yet in the bright sprinklings of the Spirit's torch
at parting, Scrooge had his eye upon them, and especially on Tiny Tim, until
the last.
By this time it was getting dark, and
snowing pretty heavily; and as Scrooge and the Spirit went along the streets,
the brightness of the roaring fires in kitchens, parlours, and all sorts of
rooms, was wonderful. Here, the flickering of the blaze showed preparations for
a cosy dinner, with hot plates baking through and through before the fire, and
deep red curtains, ready to be drawn to shut out cold and darkness. There all
the children of the house were running out into the snow to meet their married
sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts, and be the first to greet them.
Here, again, were shadows on the window-blind of guests assembling; and there a
group of handsome girls, all hooded and fur-booted, and all chattering at once,
tripped lightly off to some near neighbour's house; where, woe upon the single
man who saw them enter--artful witches, well they knew it--in a glow!
But, if you had judged from the numbers of
people on their way to friendly gatherings, you might have thought that no one
was at home to give them welcome when they got there, instead of every house
expecting company, and piling up its fires half-chimney high. Blessings on it,
how the Ghost exulted! How it bared its breadth of breast, and opened its
capacious palm, and floated on, outpouring, with a generous hand, its bright
and harmless mirth on everything within its reach! The very lamplighter, who
ran on before, dotting the dusky street with specks of light, and who was
dressed to spend the evening somewhere, laughed out loudly as the Spirit passed,
though little kenned the lamplighter that he had any company but Christmas!
And now, without a word of warning from the
Ghost, they stood upon a bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses of rude
stone were cast about, as though it were the burial-place of giants; and water
spread itself wheresoever it listed, or would have done so, but for the frost
that held it prisoner; and nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse rank
grass. Down in the west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery red, which
glared upon the desolation for an instant, like a sullen eye, and frowning
lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in the thick gloom of darkest night.
"What place is this?" asked
Scrooge.
"A place where Miners live, who labour
in the bowels of the earth," returned the Spirit. "But they know me.
See!"
A light shone from the window of a hut, and
swiftly they advanced towards it. Passing through the wall of mud and stone,
they found a cheerful company assembled round a glowing fire. An old, old man
and woman, with their children and their children's children, and another
generation beyond that, all decked out gaily in their holiday attire. The old
man, in a voice that seldom rose above the howling of the wind upon the barren
waste, was singing them a Christmas song--it had been a very old song when he
was a boy--and from time to time they all joined in the chorus. So surely as
they raised their voices, the old man got quite blithe and loud; and so surely
as they stopped, his vigour sank again.
The Spirit did not tarry here, but bade
Scrooge hold his robe, and passing on above the moor, sped--whither? Not to
sea? To sea. To Scrooge's horror, looking back, he saw the last of the land, a
frightful range of rocks, behind them; and his ears were deafened by the thundering
of water, as it rolled and roared, and raged among the dreadful caverns it had
worn, and fiercely tried to undermine the earth.
Built upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks,
some league or so from shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed, the wild
year through, there stood a solitary lighthouse. Great heaps of sea-weed clung
to its base, and storm-birds --born of the wind one might suppose, as sea-weed
of the water--rose and fell about it, like the waves they skimmed.
But even here, two men who watched the
light had made a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed
out a ray of brightness on the awful sea. Joining their horny hands over the
rough table at which they sat, they wished each other Merry Christmas in their
can of grog; and one of them: the elder, too, with his face all damaged and
scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship might be: struck
up a sturdy song that was like a Gale in itself.
Again the Ghost sped on, above the black
and heaving sea --on, on--until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any
shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the
look-out in the bow, the officers who had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in
their several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or
had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of some
bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And every man on
board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another on
that day than on any day in the year; and had shared to some extent in its
festivities; and had remembered those he cared for at a distance, and had known
that they delighted to remember him.
It was a great surprise to Scrooge, while
listening to the moaning of the wind, and thinking what a solemn thing it was
to move on through the lonely darkness over an unknown abyss, whose depths were
secrets as profound as Death: it was a great surprise to Scrooge, while thus
engaged, to hear a hearty laugh. It was a much greater surprise to Scrooge to
recognise it as his own nephew's and to find himself in a bright, dry, gleaming
room, with the Spirit standing smiling by his side, and looking at that same
nephew with approving affability!
"Ha, ha!" laughed Scrooge's
nephew. "Ha, ha, ha!"
If you should happen, by any unlikely
chance, to know a man more blest in a laugh than Scrooge's nephew, all I can
say is, I should like to know him too. Introduce him to me, and I'll cultivate
his acquaintance.
It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment
of things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is
nothing in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour.
When Scrooge's nephew laughed in this way: holding his sides, rolling his head,
and twisting his face into the most extravagant contortions: Scrooge's niece,
by marriage, laughed as heartily as he. And their assembled friends being not a
bit behindhand, roared out lustily.
"Ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!"
"He said that Christmas was a humbug,
as I live!" cried Scrooge's nephew. "He believed it too!"
"More shame for him, Fred!" said
Scrooge's niece, indignantly. Bless those women; they never do anything by
halves. They are always in earnest.
She was very pretty: exceedingly pretty.
With a dimpled, surprised-looking, capital face; a ripe little mouth, that
seemed made to be kissed--as no doubt it was; all kinds of good little dots
about her chin, that melted into one another when she laughed; and the sunniest
pair of eyes you ever saw in any little creature's head. Altogether she was
what you would have called provoking, you know; but satisfactory, too. Oh,
perfectly satisfactory.
"He's a comical old fellow," said
Scrooge's nephew, "that's the truth: and not so pleasant as he might be.
However, his offences carry their own punishment, and I have nothing to say
against him."
"I'm sure he is very rich, Fred,"
hinted Scrooge's niece. "At least you always tell me so."
"What of that, my dear!" said
Scrooge's nephew. "His wealth is of no use to him. He don't do any good
with it. He don't make himself comfortable with it. He hasn't the satisfaction
of thinking--ha, ha, ha!--that he is ever going to benefit US with it."
"I have no patience with him,"
observed Scrooge's niece. Scrooge's niece's sisters, and all the other ladies,
expressed the same opinion.
"Oh, I have!" said Scrooge's
nephew. "I am sorry for him; I couldn't be angry with him if I tried. Who
suffers by his ill whims! Himself, always. Here, he takes it into his head to
dislike us, and he won't come and dine with us. What's the consequence? He
don't lose much of a dinner."
"Indeed, I think he loses a very good
dinner," interrupted Scrooge's niece. Everybody else said the same, and
they must be allowed to have been competent judges, because they had just had
dinner; and, with the dessert upon the table, were clustered round the fire, by
lamplight.
"Well! I'm very glad to hear it,"
said Scrooge's nephew, "because I haven't great faith in these young
housekeepers. What do you say, Topper?"
Topper had clearly got his eye upon one of
Scrooge's niece's sisters, for he answered that a bachelor was a wretched
outcast, who had no right to express an opinion on the subject. Whereat
Scrooge's niece's sister--the plump one with the lace tucker: not the one with
the roses--blushed.
"Do go on, Fred," said Scrooge's
niece, clapping her hands. "He never finishes what he begins to say! He is
such a ridiculous fellow!"
Scrooge's nephew revelled in another laugh,
and as it was impossible to keep the infection off; though the plump sister
tried hard to do it with aromatic vinegar; his example was unanimously
followed.
"I was only going to say," said
Scrooge's nephew, "that the consequence of his taking a dislike to us, and
not making merry with us, is, as I think, that he loses some pleasant moments,
which could do him no harm. I am sure he loses pleasanter companions than he
can find in his own thoughts, either in his mouldy old office, or his dusty
chambers. I mean to give him the same chance every year, whether he likes it or
not, for I pity him. He may rail at Christmas till he dies, but he can't help
thinking better of it--I defy him--if he finds me going there, in good temper,
year after year, and saying Uncle Scrooge, how are you? If it only puts him in
the vein to leave his poor clerk fifty pounds, that's something; and I think I
shook him yesterday."
It was their turn to laugh now at the
notion of his shaking Scrooge. But being thoroughly good-natured, and not much
caring what they laughed at, so that they laughed at any rate, he encouraged
them in their merriment, and passed the bottle joyously.
After tea, they had some music. For they
were a musical family, and knew what they were about, when they sung a Glee or
Catch, I can assure you: especially Topper, who could growl away in the bass
like a good one, and never swell the large veins in his forehead, or get red in
the face over it. Scrooge's niece played well upon the harp; and played among
other tunes a simple little air (a mere nothing: you might learn to whistle it
in two minutes), which had been familiar to the child who fetched Scrooge from
the boarding-school, as he had been reminded by the Ghost of Christmas Past.
When this strain of music sounded, all the things that Ghost had shown him,
came upon his mind; he softened more and more; and thought that if he could
have listened to it often, years ago, he might have cultivated the kindnesses
of life for his own happiness with his own hands, without resorting to the
sexton's spade that buried Jacob Marley.
But they didn't devote the whole evening to
music. After a while they played at forfeits; for it is good to be children
sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child
himself. Stop! There was first a game at blind-man's buff. Of course there was.
And I no more believe Topper was really blind than I believe he had eyes in his
boots. My opinion is, that it was a done thing between him and Scrooge's
nephew; and that the Ghost of Christmas Present knew it. The way he went after
that plump sister in the lace tucker, was an outrage on the credulity of human
nature. Knocking down the fire-irons, tumbling over the chairs, bumping against
the piano, smothering himself among the curtains, wherever she went, there went
he! He always knew where the plump sister was. He wouldn't catch anybody else.
If you had fallen up against him (as some of them did), on purpose, he would
have made a feint of endeavouring to seize you, which would have been an
affront to your understanding, and would instantly have sidled off in the
direction of the plump sister. She often cried out that it wasn't fair; and it
really was not. But when at last, he caught her; when, in spite of all her
silken rustlings, and her rapid flutterings past him, he got her into a corner
whence there was no escape; then his conduct was the most execrable. For his
pretending not to know her; his pretending that it was necessary to touch her
head-dress, and further to assure himself of her identity by pressing a certain
ring upon her finger, and a certain chain about her neck; was vile, monstrous!
No doubt she told him her opinion of it, when, another blind-man being in
office, they were so very confidential together, behind the curtains.
Scrooge's niece was not one of the
blind-man's buff party, but was made comfortable with a large chair and a
footstool, in a snug corner, where the Ghost and Scrooge were close behind her.
But she joined in the forfeits, and loved her love to admiration with all the
letters of the alphabet. Likewise at the game of How, When, and Where, she was
very great, and to the secret joy of Scrooge's nephew, beat her sisters hollow:
though they were sharp girls too, as Topper could have told you. There might
have been twenty people there, young and old, but they all played, and so did
Scrooge; for wholly forgetting in the interest he had in what was going on,
that his voice made no sound in their ears, he sometimes came out with his
guess quite loud, and very often guessed quite right, too; for the sharpest
needle, best Whitechapel, warranted not to cut in the eye, was not sharper than
Scrooge; blunt as he took it in his head to be.
The Ghost was greatly pleased to find him
in this mood, and looked upon him with such favour, that he begged like a boy
to be allowed to stay until the guests departed. But this the Spirit said could
not be done.
"Here is a new game," said
Scrooge. "One half hour, Spirit, only one!"
It was a Game called Yes and No, where
Scrooge's nephew had to think of something, and the rest must find out what; he
only answering to their questions yes or no, as the case was. The brisk fire of
questioning to which he was exposed, elicited from him that he was thinking of
an animal, a live animal, rather a disagreeable animal, a savage animal, an
animal that growled and grunted sometimes, and talked sometimes, and lived in
London, and walked about the streets, and wasn't made a show of, and wasn't led
by anybody, and didn't live in a menagerie, and was never killed in a market,
and was not a horse, or an ass, or a cow, or a bull, or a tiger, or a dog, or a
pig, or a cat, or a bear. At every fresh question that was put to him, this
nephew burst into a fresh roar of laughter; and was so inexpressibly tickled,
that he was obliged to get up off the sofa and stamp. At last the plump sister,
falling into a similar state, cried out:
"I have found it out! I know what it
is, Fred! I know what it is!"
"What is it?" cried Fred.
"It's your Uncle Scro-o-o-o-oge!"
Which it certainly was. Admiration was the
universal sentiment, though some objected that the reply to "Is it a
bear?" ought to have been "Yes;" inasmuch as an answer in the
negative was sufficient to have diverted their thoughts from Mr. Scrooge,
supposing they had ever had any tendency that way.
"He has given us plenty of merriment,
I am sure," said Fred, "and it would be ungrateful not to drink his
health. Here is a glass of mulled wine ready to our hand at the moment; and I
say, 'Uncle Scrooge!'"
"Well! Uncle Scrooge!" they
cried.
"A Merry Christmas and a Happy New
Year to the old man, whatever he is!" said Scrooge's nephew. "He
wouldn't take it from me, but may he have it, nevertheless. Uncle
Scrooge!"
Uncle Scrooge had imperceptibly become so
gay and light of heart, that he would have pledged the unconscious company in
return, and thanked them in an inaudible speech, if the Ghost had given him
time. But the whole scene passed off in the breath of the last word spoken by
his nephew; and he and the Spirit were again upon their travels.
Much they saw, and far they went, and many
homes they visited, but always with a happy end. The Spirit stood beside sick
beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands, and they were close at home; by
struggling men, and they were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it
was rich. In almshouse, hospital, and jail, in misery's every refuge, where
vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast the door, and barred
the Spirit out, he left his blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts.
It was a long night, if it were only a
night; but Scrooge had his doubts of this, because the Christmas Holidays
appeared to be condensed into the space of time they passed together. It was
strange, too, that while Scrooge remained unaltered in his outward form, the
Ghost grew older, clearly older. Scrooge had observed this change, but never
spoke of it, until they left a children's Twelfth Night party, when, looking at
the Spirit as they stood together in an open place, he noticed that its hair
was grey.
"Are spirits' lives so short?"
asked Scrooge.
"My life upon this globe, is very
brief," replied the Ghost. "It ends to-night."
"To-night!" cried Scrooge.
"To-night at
The chimes were ringing the three quarters
past eleven at that moment.
"Forgive me if I am not justified in
what I ask," said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe,
"but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding
from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?"
"It might be a claw, for the flesh
there is upon it," was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. "Look
here."
From the foldings of its robe, it brought
two children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down
at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
"Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down
here!" exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre,
ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where
graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its
freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and
twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat
enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation,
no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful
creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them
shown to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the
words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous
magnitude.
"Spirit! are they yours?" Scrooge
could say no more.
"They are Man's," said the
Spirit, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from
their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and
all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see
that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!" cried
the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. "Slander those who
tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide
the end!"
"Have they no refuge or
resource?" cried Scrooge.
"Are there no prisons?" said the
Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. "Are there no
workhouses?"
The bell struck twelve.
Scrooge looked about him for the Ghost, and
saw it not. As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, he remembered the prediction
of old Jacob Marley, and lifting up his eyes, beheld a solemn Phantom, draped
and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, towards him.
THE Phantom slowly, gravely, silently,
approached. When it came near him, Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in the
very air through which this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and
mystery.
It was shrouded in a deep black garment,
which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible
save one outstretched hand. But for this it would have been difficult to detach
its figure from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which it was
surrounded.
He felt that it was tall and stately when
it came beside him, and that its mysterious presence filled him with a solemn
dread. He knew no more, for the Spirit neither spoke nor moved.
"I am in the presence of the Ghost of
Christmas Yet To Come?" said Scrooge.
The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward
with its hand.
"You are about to show me shadows of
the things that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us,"
Scrooge pursued. "Is that so, Spirit?"
The upper portion of the garment was
contracted for an instant in its folds, as if the Spirit had inclined its head.
That was the only answer he received.
Although well used to ghostly company by
this time, Scrooge feared the silent shape so much that his legs trembled
beneath him, and he found that he could hardly stand when he prepared to follow
it. The Spirit paused a moment, as observing his condition, and giving him time
to recover.
But Scrooge was all the worse for this. It
thrilled him with a vague uncertain horror, to know that behind the dusky
shroud, there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon him, while he, though he
stretched his own to the utmost, could see nothing but a spectral hand and one
great heap of black.
"Ghost of the Future!" he
exclaimed, "I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know
your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from
what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart.
Will you not speak to me?"
It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed
straight before them.
"Lead on!" said Scrooge.
"Lead on! The night is waning fast, and it is precious time to me, I know.
Lead on, Spirit!"
The Phantom moved away as it had come
towards him. Scrooge followed in the shadow of its dress, which bore him up, he
thought, and carried him along.
They scarcely seemed to enter the city; for
the city rather seemed to spring up about them, and encompass them of its own
act. But there they were, in the heart of it; on 'Change, amongst the
merchants; who hurried up and down, and chinked the money in their pockets, and
conversed in groups, and looked at their watches, and trifled thoughtfully with
their great gold seals; and so forth, as Scrooge had seen them often.
The Spirit stopped beside one little knot
of business men. Observing that the hand was pointed to them, Scrooge advanced
to listen to their talk.
"No," said a great fat man with a
monstrous chin, "I don't know much about it, either way. I only know he's
dead."
"When did he die?" inquired
another.
"Last night, I believe."
"Why, what was the matter with
him?" asked a third, taking a vast quantity of snuff out of a very large
snuff-box. "I thought he'd never die."
"God knows," said the first, with
a yawn.
"What has he done with his
money?" asked a red-faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the
end of his nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock.
"I haven't heard," said the man
with the large chin, yawning again. "Left it to his company, perhaps. He
hasn't left it to me. That's all I know."
This pleasantry was received with a general
laugh.
"It's likely to be a very cheap
funeral," said the same speaker; "for upon my life I don't know of
anybody to go to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?"
"I don't mind going if a lunch is
provided," observed the gentleman with the excrescence on his nose.
"But I must be fed, if I make one."
Another laugh.
"Well, I am the most disinterested
among you, after all," said the first speaker, "for I never wear
black gloves, and I never eat lunch. But I'll offer to go, if anybody else
will. When I come to think of it, I'm not at all sure that I wasn't his most
particular friend; for we used to stop and speak whenever we met. Bye,
bye!"
Speakers and listeners strolled away, and
mixed with other groups. Scrooge knew the men, and looked towards the Spirit
for an explanation.
The Phantom glided on into a street. Its
finger pointed to two persons meeting. Scrooge listened again, thinking that
the explanation might lie here.
He knew these men, also, perfectly. They
were men of business: very wealthy, and of great importance. He had made a
point always of standing well in their esteem: in a business point of view,
that is; strictly in a business point of view.
"How are you?" said one.
"How are you?" returned the
other.
"Well!" said the first. "Old
Scratch has got his own at last, hey?"
"So I am told," returned the
second. "Cold, isn't it?"
"Seasonable for Christmas time. You're
not a skater, I suppose?"
"No. No. Something else to think of.
Good morning!"
Not another word. That was their meeting,
their conversation, and their parting.
Scrooge was at first inclined to be
surprised that the Spirit should attach importance to conversations apparently
so trivial; but feeling assured that they must have some hidden purpose, he set
himself to consider what it was likely to be. They could scarcely be supposed
to have any bearing on the death of Jacob, his old partner, for that was Past,
and this Ghost's province was the Future. Nor could he think of any one
immediately connected with himself, to whom he could apply them. But nothing
doubting that to whomsoever they applied they had some latent moral for his own
improvement, he resolved to treasure up every word he heard, and everything he
saw; and especially to observe the shadow of himself when it appeared. For he
had an expectation that the conduct of his future self would give him the clue he
missed, and would render the solution of these riddles easy.
He looked about in that very place for his
own image; but another man stood in his accustomed corner, and though the clock
pointed to his usual time of day for being there, he saw no likeness of himself
among the multitudes that poured in through the Porch. It gave him little
surprise, however; for he had been revolving in his mind a change of life, and
thought and hoped he saw his new-born resolutions carried out in this.
Quiet and dark, beside him stood the
Phantom, with its outstretched hand. When he roused himself from his thoughtful
quest, he fancied from the turn of the hand, and its situation in reference to
himself, that the Unseen Eyes were looking at him keenly. It made him shudder, and
feel very cold.
They left the busy scene, and went into an
obscure part of the town, where Scrooge had never penetrated before, although
he recognised its situation, and its bad repute. The ways were foul and narrow;
the shops and houses wretched; the people half-naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly.
Alleys and archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of smell,
and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the whole quarter reeked
with crime, with filth, and misery.
Far in this den of infamous resort, there
was a low-browed, beetling shop, below a pent-house roof, where iron, old rags,
bottles, bones, and greasy offal, were bought. Upon the floor within, were
piled up heaps of rusty keys, nails, chains, hinges, files, scales, weights, and
refuse iron of all kinds. Secrets that few would like to scrutinise were bred
and hidden in mountains of unseemly rags, masses of corrupted fat, and
sepulchres of bones. Sitting in among the wares he dealt in, by a charcoal
stove, made of old bricks, was a grey-haired rascal, nearly seventy years of
age; who had screened himself from the cold air without, by a frousy curtaining
of miscellaneous tatters, hung upon a line; and smoked his pipe in all the
luxury of calm retirement.
Scrooge and the Phantom came into the
presence of this man, just as a woman with a heavy bundle slunk into the shop.
But she had scarcely entered, when another woman, similarly laden, came in too;
and she was closely followed by a man in faded black, who was no less startled
by the sight of them, than they had been upon the recognition of each other.
After a short period of blank astonishment, in which the old man with the pipe
had joined them, they all three burst into a laugh.
"Let the charwoman alone to be the
first!" cried she who had entered first. "Let the laundress alone to
be the second; and let the undertaker's man alone to be the third. Look here,
old Joe, here's a chance! If we haven't all three met here without meaning
it!"
"You couldn't have met in a better
place," said old Joe, removing his pipe from his mouth. "Come into
the parlour. You were made free of it long ago, you know; and the other two
an't strangers. Stop till I shut the door of the shop. Ah! How it skreeks!
There an't such a rusty bit of metal in the place as its own hinges, I believe;
and I'm sure there's no such old bones here, as mine. Ha, ha! We're all
suitable to our calling, we're well matched. Come into the parlour. Come into
the parlour."
The parlour was the space behind the screen
of rags. The old man raked the fire together with an old stair-rod, and having
trimmed his smoky lamp (for it was night), with the stem of his pipe, put it in
his mouth again.
While he did this, the woman who had
already spoken threw her bundle on the floor, and sat down in a flaunting
manner on a stool; crossing her elbows on her knees, and looking with a bold
defiance at the other two.
"What odds then! What odds, Mrs.
Dilber?" said the woman. "Every person has a right to take care of
themselves. He always did."
"That's true, indeed!" said the
laundress. "No man more so."
"Why then, don't stand staring as if
you was afraid, woman; who's the wiser? We're not going to pick holes in each
other's coats, I suppose?"
"No, indeed!" said Mrs. Dilber
and the man together. "We should hope not."
"Very well, then!" cried the
woman. "That's enough. Who's the worse for the loss of a few things like
these? Not a dead man, I suppose."
"No, indeed," said Mrs. Dilber,
laughing.
"If he wanted to keep 'em after he was
dead, a wicked old screw," pursued the woman, "why wasn't he natural
in his lifetime? If he had been, he'd have had somebody to look after him when
he was struck with Death, instead of lying gasping out his last there, alone by
himself."
"It's the truest word that ever was
spoke," said Mrs. Dilber. "It's a judgment on him."
"I wish it was a little heavier
judgment," replied the woman; "and it should have been, you may
depend upon it, if I could have laid my hands on anything else. Open that
bundle, old Joe, and let me know the value of it. Speak out plain. I'm not
afraid to be the first, nor afraid for them to see it. We know pretty well that
we were helping ourselves, before we met here, I believe. It's no sin. Open the
bundle, Joe."
But the gallantry of her friends would not
allow of this; and the man in faded black, mounting the breach first, produced
his plunder. It was not extensive. A seal or two, a pencil-case, a pair of
sleeve-buttons, and a brooch of no great value, were all. They were severally
examined and appraised by old Joe, who chalked the sums he was disposed to give
for each, upon the wall, and added them up into a total when he found there was
nothing more to come.
"That's your account," said Joe,
"and I wouldn't give another sixpence, if I was to be boiled for not doing
it. Who's next?"
Mrs. Dilber was next. Sheets and towels, a
little wearing apparel, two old-fashioned silver teaspoons, a pair of
sugar-tongs, and a few boots. Her account was stated on the wall in the same
manner.
"I always give too much to ladies.
It's a weakness of mine, and that's the way I ruin myself," said old Joe.
"That's your account. If you asked me for another penny, and made it an
open question, I'd repent of being so liberal and knock off half-a-crown."
"And now undo my bundle, Joe,"
said the first woman.
Joe went down on his knees for the greater
convenience of opening it, and having unfastened a great many knots, dragged
out a large and heavy roll of some dark stuff.
"What do you call this?" said
Joe. "Bed-curtains!"
"Ah!" returned the woman,
laughing and leaning forward on her crossed arms. "Bed-curtains!"
"You don't mean to say you took 'em
down, rings and all, with him lying there?" said Joe.
"Yes I do," replied the woman.
"Why not?"
"You were born to make your
fortune," said Joe, "and you'll certainly do it."
"I certainly shan't hold my hand, when
I can get anything in it by reaching it out, for the sake of such a man as He
was, I promise you, Joe," returned the woman coolly. "Don't drop that
oil upon the blankets, now."
"His blankets?" asked Joe.
"Whose else's do you think?"
replied the woman. "He isn't likely to take cold without 'em, I dare
say."
"I hope he didn't die of anything
catching? Eh?" said old Joe, stopping in his work, and looking up.
"Don't you be afraid of that," returned
the woman. "I an't so fond of his company that I'd loiter about him for
such things, if he did. Ah! you may look through that shirt till your eyes
ache; but you won't find a hole in it, nor a threadbare place. It's the best he
had, and a fine one too. They'd have wasted it, if it hadn't been for me."
"What do you call wasting of it?"
asked old Joe.
"Putting it on him to be buried in, to
be sure," replied the woman with a laugh. "Somebody was fool enough
to do it, but I took it off again. If calico an't good enough for such a
purpose, it isn't good enough for anything. It's quite as becoming to the body.
He can't look uglier than he did in that one."
Scrooge listened to this dialogue in
horror. As they sat grouped about their spoil, in the scanty light afforded by
the old man's lamp, he viewed them with a detestation and disgust, which could
hardly have been greater, though they had been obscene demons, marketing the
corpse itself.
"Ha, ha!" laughed the same woman,
when old Joe, producing a flannel bag with money in it, told out their several
gains upon the ground. "This is the end of it, you see! He frightened
every one away from him when he was alive, to profit us when he was dead! Ha,
ha, ha!"
"Spirit!" said Scrooge,
shuddering from head to foot. "I see, I see. The case of this unhappy man
might be my own. My life tends that way, now. Merciful Heaven, what is
this!"
He recoiled in terror, for the scene had
changed, and now he almost touched a bed: a bare, uncurtained bed: on which,
beneath a ragged sheet, there lay a something covered up, which, though it was
dumb, announced itself in awful language.
The room was very dark, too dark to be
observed with any accuracy, though Scrooge glanced round it in obedience to a
secret impulse, anxious to know what kind of room it was. A pale light, rising
in the outer air, fell straight upon the bed; and on it, plundered and bereft,
unwatched, unwept, uncared for, was the body of this man.
Scrooge glanced towards the Phantom. Its
steady hand was pointed to the head. The cover was so carelessly adjusted that
the slightest raising of it, the motion of a finger upon Scrooge's part, would
have disclosed the face. He thought of it, felt how easy it would be to do, and
longed to do it; but had no more power to withdraw the veil than to dismiss the
spectre at his side.
Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set
up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy
command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured
head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature
odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it
is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand WAS open,
generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man's.
Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow
the world with life immortal!
No voice pronounced these words in
Scrooge's ears, and yet he heard them when he looked upon the bed. He thought,
if this man could be raised up now, what would be his foremost thoughts?
Avarice, hard-dealing, griping cares? They have brought him to a rich end,
truly!
He lay, in the dark empty house, with not a
man, a woman, or a child, to say that he was kind to me in this or that, and
for the memory of one kind word I will be kind to him. A cat was tearing at the
door, and there was a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth-stone. What they
wanted in the room of death, and why they were so restless and disturbed, Scrooge
did not dare to think.
"Spirit!" he said, "this is
a fearful place. In leaving it, I shall not leave its lesson, trust me. Let us
go!"
Still the Ghost pointed with an unmoved
finger to the head.
"I understand you," Scrooge
returned, "and I would do it, if I could. But I have not the power,
Spirit. I have not the power."
Again it seemed to look upon him.
"If there is any person in the town,
who feels emotion caused by this man's death," said Scrooge quite
agonised, "show that person to me, Spirit, I beseech you!"
The Phantom spread its dark robe before him
for a moment, like a wing; and withdrawing it, revealed a room by daylight,
where a mother and her children were.
She was expecting some one, and with
anxious eagerness; for she walked up and down the room; started at every sound;
looked out from the window; glanced at the clock; tried, but in vain, to work
with her needle; and could hardly bear the voices of the children in their
play.
At length the long-expected knock was
heard. She hurried to the door, and met her husband; a man whose face was
careworn and depressed, though he was young. There was a remarkable expression
in it now; a kind of serious delight of which he felt ashamed, and which he
struggled to repress.
He sat down to the dinner that had been
hoarding for him by the fire; and when she asked him faintly what news (which
was not until after a long silence), he appeared embarrassed how to answer.
"Is it good?" she said, "or
bad?"--to help him.
"Bad," he answered.
"We are quite ruined?"
"No. There is hope yet,
Caroline."
"If he relents," she said,
amazed, "there is! Nothing is past hope, if such a miracle has
happened."
"He is past relenting," said her
husband. "He is dead."
She was a mild and patient creature if her
face spoke truth; but she was thankful in her soul to hear it, and she said so,
with clasped hands. She prayed forgiveness the next moment, and was sorry; but
the first was the emotion of her heart.
"What the half-drunken woman whom I
told you of last night, said to me, when I tried to see him and obtain a week's
delay; and what I thought was a mere excuse to avoid me; turns out to have been
quite true. He was not only very ill, but dying, then."
"To whom will our debt be
transferred?"
"I don't know. But before that time we
shall be ready with the money; and even though we were not, it would be a bad
fortune indeed to find so merciless a creditor in his successor. We may sleep
to-night with light hearts, Caroline!"
Yes. Soften it as they would, their hearts
were lighter. The children's faces, hushed and clustered round to hear what
they so little understood, were brighter; and it was a happier house for this
man's death! The only emotion that the Ghost could show him, caused by the
event, was one of pleasure.
"Let me see some tenderness connected
with a death," said Scrooge; "or that dark chamber, Spirit, which we
left just now, will be for ever present to me."
The Ghost conducted him through several
streets familiar to his feet; and as they went along, Scrooge looked here and
there to find himself, but nowhere was he to be seen. They entered poor Bob
Cratchit's house; the dwelling he had visited before; and found the mother and
the children seated round the fire.
Quiet. Very quiet. The noisy little
Cratchits were as still as statues in one corner, and sat looking up at Peter,
who had a book before him. The mother and her daughters were engaged in sewing.
But surely they were very quiet!
"'And He took a child, and set him in
the midst of them.'"
Where had Scrooge heard those words? He had
not dreamed them. The boy must have read them out, as he and the Spirit crossed
the threshold. Why did he not go on?
The mother laid her work upon the table,
and put her hand up to her face.
"The colour hurts my eyes," she
said.
The colour? Ah, poor Tiny Tim!
"They're better now again," said
Cratchit's wife. "It makes them weak by candle-light; and I wouldn't show
weak eyes to your father when he comes home, for the world. It must be near his
time."
"Past it rather," Peter answered,
shutting up his book. "But I think he has walked a little slower than he
used, these few last evenings, mother."
They were very quiet again. At last she
said, and in a steady, cheerful voice, that only faltered once:
"I have known him walk with--I have
known him walk with Tiny Tim upon his shoulder, very fast indeed."
"And so have I," cried Peter.
"Often."
"And so have I," exclaimed
another. So had all.
"But he was very light to carry,"
she resumed, intent upon her work, "and his father loved him so, that it
was no trouble: no trouble. And there is your father at the door!"
She hurried out to meet him; and little Bob
in his comforter --he had need of it, poor fellow--came in. His tea was ready
for him on the hob, and they all tried who should help him to it most. Then the
two young Cratchits got upon his knees and laid, each child a little cheek,
against his face, as if they said, "Don't mind it, father. Don't be
grieved!"
Bob was very cheerful with them, and spoke
pleasantly to all the family. He looked at the work upon the table, and praised
the industry and speed of Mrs. Cratchit and the girls. They would be done long
before Sunday, he said.
"Sunday! You went to-day, then,
Robert?" said his wife.
"Yes, my dear," returned Bob.
"I wish you could have gone. It would have done you good to see how green
a place it is. But you'll see it often. I promised him that I would walk there
on a Sunday. My little, little child!" cried Bob. "My little
child!"
He broke down all at once. He couldn't help
it. If he could have helped it, he and his child would have been farther apart
perhaps than they were.
He left the room, and went up-stairs into
the room above, which was lighted cheerfully, and hung with Christmas. There
was a chair set close beside the child, and there were signs of some one having
been there, lately. Poor Bob sat down in it, and when he had thought a little
and composed himself, he kissed the little face. He was reconciled to what had
happened, and went down again quite happy.
They drew about the fire, and talked; the
girls and mother working still. Bob told them of the extraordinary kindness of
Mr. Scrooge's nephew, whom he had scarcely seen but once, and who, meeting him
in the street that day, and seeing that he looked a little--"just a little
down you know," said Bob, inquired what had happened to distress him.
"On which," said Bob, "for he is the pleasantest-spoken
gentleman you ever heard, I told him. 'I am heartily sorry for it, Mr. Cratchit,'
he said, 'and heartily sorry for your good wife.' By the bye, how he ever knew
that, I don't know."
"Knew what, my dear?"
"Why, that you were a good wife,"
replied Bob.
"Everybody knows that!" said
Peter.
"Very well observed, my boy!"
cried Bob. "I hope they do. 'Heartily sorry,' he said, 'for your good
wife. If I can be of service to you in any way,' he said, giving me his card,
'that's where I live. Pray come to me.' Now, it wasn't," cried Bob,
"for the sake of anything he might be able to do for us, so much as for his
kind way, that this was quite delightful. It really seemed as if he had known
our Tiny Tim, and felt with us."
"I'm sure he's a good soul!" said
Mrs. Cratchit.
"You would be surer of it, my
dear," returned Bob, "if you saw and spoke to him. I shouldn't be at
all surprised-- mark what I say!--if he got Peter a better situation."
"Only hear that, Peter," said
Mrs. Cratchit.
"And then," cried one of the
girls, "Peter will be keeping company with some one, and setting up for
himself."
"Get along with you!" retorted
Peter, grinning.
"It's just as likely as not,"
said Bob, "one of these days; though there's plenty of time for that, my
dear. But however and whenever we part from one another, I am sure we shall
none of us forget poor Tiny Tim--shall we--or this first parting that there was
among us?"
"Never, father!" cried they all.
"And I know," said Bob, "I
know, my dears, that when we recollect how patient and how mild he was;
although he was a little, little child; we shall not quarrel easily among
ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it."
"No, never, father!" they all
cried again.
"I am very happy," said little
Bob, "I am very happy!"
Mrs. Cratchit kissed him, his daughters
kissed him, the two young Cratchits kissed him, and Peter and himself shook
hands. Spirit of Tiny Tim, thy childish essence was from God!
"Spectre," said Scrooge,
"something informs me that our parting moment is at hand. I know it, but I
know not how. Tell me what man that was whom we saw lying dead?"
The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come conveyed
him, as before--though at a different time, he thought: indeed, there seemed no
order in these latter visions, save that they were in the Future--into the
resorts of business men, but showed him not himself. Indeed, the Spirit did not
stay for anything, but went straight on, as to the end just now desired, until
besought by Scrooge to tarry for a moment.
"This court," said Scrooge,
"through which we hurry now, is where my place of occupation is, and has
been for a length of time. I see the house. Let me behold what I shall be, in
days to come!"
The Spirit stopped; the hand was pointed
elsewhere.
"The house is yonder," Scrooge
exclaimed. "Why do you point away?"
The inexorable finger underwent no change.
Scrooge hastened to the window of his
office, and looked in. It was an office still, but not his. The furniture was
not the same, and the figure in the chair was not himself. The Phantom pointed
as before.
He joined it once again, and wondering why
and whither he had gone, accompanied it until they reached an iron gate. He
paused to look round before entering.
A churchyard. Here, then; the wretched man
whose name he had now to learn, lay underneath the ground. It was a worthy
place. Walled in by houses; overrun by grass and weeds, the growth of
vegetation's death, not life; choked up with too much burying; fat with
repleted appetite. A worthy place!
The Spirit stood among the graves, and
pointed down to One. He advanced towards it trembling. The Phantom was exactly
as it had been, but he dreaded that he saw new meaning in its solemn shape.
"Before I draw nearer to that stone to
which you point," said Scrooge, "answer me one question. Are these
the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May
be, only?"
Still the Ghost pointed downward to the
grave by which it stood.
"Men's courses will foreshadow certain
ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But
if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what
you show me!"
The Spirit was immovable as ever.
Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he
went; and following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his
own name, EBENEZER SCROOGE.
"Am I that man who lay upon the
bed?" he cried, upon his knees.
The finger pointed from the grave to him,
and back again.
"No, Spirit! Oh no, no!"
The finger still was there.
"Spirit!" he cried, tight
clutching at its robe, "hear me! I am not the man I was. I will not be the
man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past
all hope!"
For the first time the hand appeared to
shake.
"Good Spirit," he pursued, as
down upon the ground he fell before it: "Your nature intercedes for me,
and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me,
by an altered life!"
The kind hand trembled.
"I will honour Christmas in my heart,
and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the
Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out
the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this
stone!"
In his agony, he caught the spectral hand.
It sought to free itself, but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it.
The Spirit, stronger yet, repulsed him.
Holding up his hands in a last prayer to
have his fate reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom's hood and dress.
It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost.
YES! and the bedpost was his own. The bed
was his own, the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before
him was his own, to make amends in!
"I will live in the Past, the Present,
and the Future!" Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. "The
Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley! Heaven, and the
Christmas Time be praised for this! I say it on my knees, old Jacob; on my
knees!"
He was so fluttered and so glowing with his
good intentions, that his broken voice would scarcely answer to his call. He
had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the Spirit, and his face was
wet with tears.
"They are not torn down," cried
Scrooge, folding one of his bed-curtains in his arms, "they are not torn
down, rings and all. They are here--I am here--the shadows of the things that would
have been, may be dispelled. They will be. I know they will!"
His hands were busy with his garments all
this time; turning them inside out, putting them on upside down, tearing them,
mislaying them, making them parties to every kind of extravagance.
"I don't know what to do!" cried
Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocooen
of himself with his stockings. "I am as light as a feather, I am as happy
as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A
merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world. Hallo here!
Whoop! Hallo!"
He had frisked into the sitting-room, and
was now standing there: perfectly winded.
"There's the saucepan that the gruel
was in!" cried Scrooge, starting off again, and going round the fireplace.
"There's the door, by which the Ghost of Jacob Marley entered! There's the
corner where the Ghost of Christmas Present, sat! There's the window where I
saw the wandering Spirits! It's all right, it's all true, it all happened. Ha
ha ha!"
Really, for a man who had been out of
practice for so many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh.
The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs!
"I don't know what day of the month it
is!" said Scrooge. "I don't know how long I've been among the
Spirits. I don't know anything. I'm quite a baby. Never mind. I don't care. I'd
rather be a baby. Hallo! Whoop! Hallo here!"
He was checked in his transports by the
churches ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang,
hammer; ding, dong, bell.
Running to the window, he opened it, and
put out his head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold,
piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh
air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!
"What's to-day!" cried Scrooge,
calling downward to a boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to
look about him.
"EH?" returned the boy, with all
his might of wonder.
"What's to-day, my fine fellow?"
said Scrooge.
"To-day!" replied the boy.
"Why, CHRISTMAS DAY."
"It's Christmas Day!" said
Scrooge to himself. "I haven't missed it. The Spirits have done it all in
one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they
can. Hallo, my fine fellow!"
"Hallo!" returned the boy.
"Do you know the Poulterer's, in the
next street but one, at the corner?" Scrooge inquired.
"I should hope I did," replied
the lad.
"An intelligent boy!" said
Scrooge. "A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they've sold the prize
"What, the one as big as me?"
returned the boy.
"What a delightful boy!" said
Scrooge. "It's a pleasure to talk to him. Yes, my buck!"
"It's hanging there now," replied
the boy.
"Is it?" said Scrooge. "Go
and buy it."
"Walk-ER!" exclaimed the boy.
"No, no," said Scrooge, "I
am in earnest. Go and buy it, and tell 'em to bring it here, that I may give
them the direction where to take it. Come back with the man, and I'll give you
a shilling. Come back with him in less than five minutes and I'll give you
half-a-crown!"
The boy was off like a shot. He must have
had a steady hand at a trigger who could have got a shot off half so fast.
"I'll send it to Bob Cratchit's!"
whispered Scrooge, rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh. "He
sha'n't know who sends it. It's twice the size of Tiny Tim. Joe Miller never
made such a joke as sending it to Bob's will be!"
The hand in which he wrote the address was
not a steady one, but write it he did, somehow, and went down-stairs to open
the street door, ready for the coming of the poulterer's man. As he stood
there, waiting his arrival, the knocker caught his eye.
"I shall love it, as long as I
live!" cried Scrooge, patting it with his hand. "I scarcely ever
looked at it before. What an honest expression it has in its face! It's a
wonderful knocker!--Here's the
It was a
"Why, it's impossible to carry that to
The chuckle with which he said this, and
the chuckle with which he paid for the Turkey, and the chuckle with which he
paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed the boy, were only
to be exceeded by the chuckle with which he sat down breathless in his chair
again, and chuckled till he cried.
Shaving was not an easy task, for his hand
continued to shake very much; and shaving requires attention, even when you
don't dance while you are at it. But if he had cut the end of his nose off, he
would have put a piece of sticking-plaister over it, and been quite satisfied.
He dressed himself "all in his
best," and at last got out into the streets. The people were by this time
pouring forth, as he had seen them with the Ghost of Christmas Present; and
walking with his hands behind him, Scrooge regarded every one with a delighted
smile. He looked so irresistibly pleasant, in a word, that three or four
good-humoured fellows said, "Good morning, sir! A merry Christmas to
you!" And Scrooge said often afterwards, that of all the blithe sounds he
had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears.
He had not gone far, when coming on towards
him he beheld the portly gentleman, who had walked into his counting-house the
day before, and said, "Scrooge and Marley's, I believe?" It sent a
pang across his heart to think how this old gentleman would look upon him when
they met; but he knew what path lay straight before him, and he took it.
"My dear sir," said Scrooge,
quickening his pace, and taking the old gentleman by both his hands. "How
do you do? I hope you succeeded yesterday. It was very kind of you. A merry
Christmas to you, sir!"
"Mr. Scrooge?"
"Yes," said Scrooge. "That
is my name, and I fear it may not be pleasant to you. Allow me to ask your
pardon. And will you have the goodness"--here Scrooge whispered in his
ear.
"Lord bless me!" cried the
gentleman, as if his breath were taken away. "My dear Mr. Scrooge, are you
serious?"
"If you please," said Scrooge.
"Not a farthing less. A great many back-payments are included in it, I
assure you. Will you do me that favour?"
"My dear sir," said the other,
shaking hands with him. "I don't know what to say to such munifi--"
"Don't say anything, please,"
retorted Scrooge. "Come and see me. Will you come and see me?"
"I will!" cried the old
gentleman. And it was clear he meant to do it.
"Thank'ee," said Scrooge. "I
am much obliged to you. I thank you fifty times. Bless you!"
He went to church, and walked about the
streets, and watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children on the
head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into the kitchens of houses, and
up to the windows, and found that everything could yield him pleasure. He had
never dreamed that any walk--that anything--could give him so much happiness.
In the afternoon he turned his steps towards his nephew's house.
He passed the door a dozen times, before he
had the courage to go up and knock. But he made a dash, and did it:
"Is your master at home, my
dear?" said Scrooge to the girl. Nice girl! Very.
"Yes, sir."
"Where is he, my love?" said
Scrooge.
"He's in the dining-room, sir, along
with mistress. I'll show you up-stairs, if you please."
"Thank'ee. He knows me," said
Scrooge, with his hand already on the dining-room lock. "I'll go in here,
my dear."
He turned it gently, and sidled his face
in, round the door. They were looking at the table (which was spread out in
great array); for these young housekeepers are always nervous on such points,
and like to see that everything is right.
"Fred!" said Scrooge.
Dear heart alive, how his niece by marriage
started! Scrooge had forgotten, for the moment, about her sitting in the corner
with the footstool, or he wouldn't have done it, on any account.
"Why bless my soul!" cried Fred,
"who's that?"
"It's I. Your uncle Scrooge. I have
come to dinner. Will you let me in, Fred?"
Let him in! It is a mercy he didn't shake
his arm off. He was at home in five minutes. Nothing could be heartier. His
niece looked just the same. So did Topper when he came. So did the plump sister
when she came. So did every one when they came. Wonderful party, wonderful
games, wonderful unanimity, won-der-ful happiness!
But he was early at the office next
morning. Oh, he was early there. If he could only be there first, and catch Bob
Cratchit coming late! That was the thing he had set his heart upon.
And he did it; yes, he did! The clock
struck nine. No Bob. A quarter past. No Bob. He was full eighteen minutes and a
half behind his time. Scrooge sat with his door wide open, that he might see
him come into the Tank.
His hat was off, before he opened the door;
his comforter too. He was on his stool in a jiffy; driving away with his pen,
as if he were trying to overtake
"Hallo!" growled Scrooge, in his
accustomed voice, as near as he could feign it. "What do you mean by
coming here at this time of day?"
"I am very sorry, sir," said Bob.
"I am behind my time."
"You are?" repeated Scrooge.
"Yes. I think you are. Step this way, sir, if you please."
"It's only once a year, sir,"
pleaded Bob, appearing from the Tank. "It shall not be repeated. I was
making rather merry yesterday, sir."
"Now, I'll tell you what, my
friend," said Scrooge, "I am not going to stand this sort of thing
any longer. And therefore," he continued, leaping from his stool, and
giving Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into the Tank
again; "and therefore I am about to raise your salary!"
Bob trembled, and got a little nearer to
the ruler. He had a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down with it, holding
him, and calling to the people in the court for help and a strait-waistcoat.
"A merry Christmas, Bob!" said
Scrooge, with an earnestness that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on
the back. "A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I have given
you, for many a year! I'll raise your salary, and endeavour to assist your
struggling family, and we will discuss your affairs this very afternoon, over a
Christmas bowl of smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another
coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!"
Scrooge was better than his word. He did it
all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was a second
father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the
good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good
old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them
laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever
happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill
of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind
anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in
grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and
that was quite enough for him.
He had no further intercourse with Spirits,
but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was
always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well, if any man alive
possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so,
as Tiny Tim observed, God bless Us, Every One!
End of Charles Dickens’ A
Christmas Carol
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