I HAVE endeavoured in this Ghostly
little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my
readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season,
or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay
it.
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
grindstone, 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 Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge.
“Are they still in operation?”
“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.
Marley’s Ghost
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 noon!”
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 United States’
security if there were no days to count by.
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.
Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball
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!”
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 Bell
struck One, and no shape appeared, he was taken with a violent fit of
trembling. Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour went by, yet
nothing came. All this time, he lay upon his bed, the very core and
centre of a blaze of ruddy light, which streamed upon it when the clock
proclaimed the hour; and which, being only light, was more alarming than
a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it meant, or would
be at; and was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very
moment an interesting case of spontaneous combustion, without having the
consolation of knowing it. At last, however, he began to think—as you
or I would have thought at first; for it is always the person not in the
predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it, and would
unquestionably have done it too—at last, I say, he began to think that
the source and secret of this ghostly light might be in the adjoining
room, from whence, on further tracing it, it seemed to shine. This idea
taking full possession of his mind, he got up softly and shuffled in his
slippers to the door.
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.
Scrooge’s Third Visitor
“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 midnight. Hark! The time is drawing
near.”
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.
The Last of the Spirits
“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 Laocoön 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. Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang, clash! Oh, glorious,
glorious!
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 Turkey that
was hanging up there?—Not the little prize Turkey: the big one?”
“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 Turkey! Hallo! Whoop! How are you! Merry
Christmas!”
It was a Turkey! He never could have stood
upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped ’em short off in a
minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.
“Why, it’s impossible to carry that to Camden
Town,” said Scrooge. “You must have a cab.”
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 nine o’clock.
“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!
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