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 ware-house 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
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 blindmen'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
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 greeting 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 ``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 might 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 tomorrow'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 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 tomorrow, 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 have
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-year's 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 upon 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, bed-room, 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 has 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 night-cap; and sat down before the fire to take his gruel.
It was a very low fire indeed; nothing on such a bitter night. He was
obliged to sit close to it, and brood over it, before he could extract the
least sensation of warmth from such a handful of fuel. The fireplace was
an old one, built by some Dutch merchant long ago, and paved all round
with quaint Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures. There were
Cains and Abels, Pharaoh's daughters, Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers
descending through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams,
Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats, hundreds of
figures to attract his thoughts; and yet that face of Marley, seven years
dead, came like the ancient Prophet's rod, and swallowed up the whole. If
each smooth tile had been a blank at first, with power to shape some
picture on its surface from the disjointed fragments of his thoughts,
there would have been a copy of old Marley's head on every one.
``Humbug!'' said Scrooge; and walked across the room.
After several turns, he sat down again. As he threw his head back in
the chair, his glance happened to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that
hung in the room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten with a
chamber in the highest story of the building. It was with great
astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked,
he saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in the outset that it
scarcely made a sound; but soon it rang out loudly, and so did every bell
in the house.
This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an
hour. The bells ceased as they had begun, together. They were succeeded by
a clanking noise, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy
chain over the casks in the wine-merchant's cellar. Scrooge then
remembered to have heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as
dragging chains.
The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the
noise much louder, on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then
coming straight towards his door.
``It's humbug still!'' said Scrooge. ``I won't believe it.''
His colour changed though, when, without a pause, it came on through
the heavy door, and passed into the room before his eyes. Upon its coming
in, the dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, ``I know him! Marley's
Ghost!'' and fell again.
The same face: the very same. Marley in his pigtail, usual waistcoat,
tights, and boots; the tassels on the latter bristling, like his pigtail,
and his coat-skirts, and the hair upon his head. The chain he drew was
clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound about him like a tail;
and it was made (for Scrooge observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys,
padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel. His body was
transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his
waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind.
Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no bowels, but he had
never believed it until now.
No, nor did he believe it even now. Though he looked the phantom
through and through, and saw it standing before him; though he felt the
chilling influence of its death-cold eyes; and marked the very texture of
the folded kerchief bound about its head and chin, which wrapper he had
not observed before; he was still incredulous, and fought against his
senses.
``How now!'' said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. ``What do you want
with me?''
``Much!'' -- Marley's voice, no doubt about it.
``Who are you?''
``Ask me who I was.''
``Who were you then.'' said Scrooge, raising his
voice. ``You're particular, for a shade.'' He was going to say
``to a shade,'' but substituted this, as more
appropriate.
``In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley.''
``Can you -- can you sit down?'' asked Scrooge, looking doubtfully at
him.
``I can.''
``Do it, then.''
Scrooge asked the question, because he didn't know whether a ghost so
transparent might find himself in a condition to take a chair; and felt
that in the event of its being impossible, it might involve the necessity
of an embarrassing explanation. But the ghost sat down on the opposite
side of the fireplace, as if he were quite used to it.
``You don't believe in me,'' observed the Ghost.
``I don't,'' said Scrooge.
``What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your
senses?''
``I don't know,'' said Scrooge.
``Why do you doubt your senses?''
``Because,'' said Scrooge, ``a little thing affects them. A slight
disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may be an undigested bit of
beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone
potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!''
Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking jokes, nor did he feel,
in his heart, by any means waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be
smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his
terror; for the spectre's voice disturbed the very marrow in his bones.
To sit, staring at those fixed, glazed eyes, in silence for a moment,
would play, Scrooge felt, the very deuce with him. There was something
very awful, too, in the spectre's being provided with an infernal
atmosphere of its own. Scrooge could not feel it himself, but this was
clearly the case; for though the Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair,
and skirts, and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapour from an
oven.
``You see this toothpick?'' said Scrooge, returning quickly to the
charge, for the reason just assigned; and wishing, though it were only for
a second, to divert the vision's stony gaze from himself.
``I do,'' replied the Ghost.
``You are not looking at it,'' said Scrooge.
``But I see it,'' said the Ghost, ``notwithstanding.''
``Well!'' returned Scrooge, ``I have but to swallow this, and be for
the rest of my days persecuted by a legion of goblins, all of my own
creation. Humbug, I tell you; humbug!''
At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook its chain with
such a dismal and appalling noise, that Scrooge held on tight to his
chair, to save himself from falling in a swoon. But how much greater was
his horror, when the phantom taking off the bandage round its head, as if
it were too warm to wear in-doors, 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 fellow-men, 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 opportunities misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was
I!''
``But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,'' faultered
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 be again, and thought, and 1 thought, and thought it
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, 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 past; 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 ``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 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 panneling, 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 an ass laden with wood by the bridle.
``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
``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 battle 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 Welch 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 shows 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 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
nother; some shyly, some boldly, some gracefully, some awkwardly, some
pushing, some pulling; in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they
all went, twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again the other
way; down the middle and up again; round and round in various stages of
affectionate grouping; old top couple always turning up in the wrong
place; new top couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all
top couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them. When this result
was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his hands to stop the dance,
cried out, ``Well done!'' and the fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot
of porter, especially provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon
his reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no dancers
yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home, exhausted, on a
shutter, and he were a bran-new man resolved to beat him out of sight, or
perish.
There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more dances, and
there was cake, and there was negus, and there was a great piece of Cold
Roast, and there was a great piece of Cold Boiled, and there were
mince-pies, and plenty of beer. But the great effect of the evening came
after the Roast and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind! The
sort of man who knew his business better than you or I could have told it
him!) struck up ``Sir Roger de Coverley.'' Then old Fezziwig stood out to
dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work
cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who
were not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and
had no notion of walking.
But if they had been twice as many: ah, four times: old Fezziwig would
have been a match for them, and so would Mrs. Fezziwig. As to
her, she was worthy to be his partner in every sense of
the term. If that's not high praise, tell me higher, and I'll use it. A
positive light appeared to issue from Fezziwig's calves. They shone in
every part of the dance like moons. You couldn't have predicted, at any
given time, what would become of 'em next. And when old Fezziwig and Mrs.
Fezziwig had gone all through the dance; advance and retire, hold hands
with your partner, bow and curtsey; 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 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 the neck, pommel his back, and kick his
legs in irrepressible affection! The shouts of wonder and delight with
which the development of every package was received! The terrible
announcement that the baby had been taken in the act of putting a doll's
frying-pan into his mouth, and was more than suspected of having swallowed
a fictitious turkey, glued on a wooden platter! The immense relief of
finding this a false alarm! The joy, and gratitude, and ecstasy! They are
all indescribable alike. It is enough that by degrees the children and
their emotions got out of the parlour, and by one stair at a time, up to
the top of the house; where they went to bed, and so subsided.
And now Scrooge looked on more attentively than ever, when the master
of the house, having his daughter leaning fondly on him, sat down with her
and her mother at his own fireside; and when he thought that such another
creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise, might have called him
father, and been a spring-time in the haggard winter of his life, his
sight grew very dim indeed.
``Belle,'' said the husband, turning to his wife with a smile, ``I saw
an old friend of yours this afternoon.''
``Who was it?''
``Guess!''
``How can I? Tut, don't I know.'' she added in the same breath,
laughing as he laughed. ``Mr Scrooge.''
``Mr Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as it was not shut
up, and he had a candle inside, I could scarcely help seeing him. His
partner lies upon the point of death, I hear; and there he sat alone.
Quite alone in the world, I do believe.''
``Spirit!'' said Scrooge in a broken voice, ``remove me from this
place.''
``I told you these were shadows of the things that have been,'' said
the Ghost. ``That they are what they are, do not blame me!''
``Remove me!'' Scrooge exclaimed, ``I cannot bear it!''
He turned upon the Ghost, and seeing that it looked upon him with a
face, in which in some strange way there were fragments of all the faces
it had shown him, wrestled with it.
``Leave me! Take me back. Haunt me no longer!''
In the struggle, if that can be called a struggle in which the Ghost
with no visible resistance on its own part was undisturbed by any effort
of its adversary, Scrooge observed that its light was burning high and
bright; and dimly connecting that with its influence over him, he seized
the extinguisher-cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down upon its
head.
The Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher covered its
whole form; but though Scrooge pressed it down with all his force, he
could not hide the light, which streamed from under it, in an unbroken
flood upon the ground.
He was conscious of being exhausted, and overcome by an irresistible
drowsiness; and, further, of being in his own bedroom. He gave the cap a
parting squeeze, in which his hand relaxed; and had barely time to reel to
bed, before he sank into a heavy sleep.
Awaking in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore, and sitting up in
bed to get his thoughts together, Scrooge had no occasion to be told that
the bell was again upon the stroke of One. He felt that he was restored to
consciousness in the right nick of time, for the especial purpose of
holding a conference with the second messenger despatched to him through
Jacob Marley's intervention. But, finding that he turned uncomfortably
cold when he began to wonder which of his curtains this new spectre would
draw back, he put them every one aside with his own hands; and lying down
again, established a sharp look-out all round the bed. For he wished to
challenge the Spirit on the moment of its appearance, and did not wish to
be taken by surprise, and made nervous.
Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves on being
acquainted with a move or two, and being usually equal to the time-of-day,
express the wide range of their capacity for adventure by observing that
they are good for anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter; between
which opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and
comprehensive range of subjects. Without venturing for Scrooge quite as
hardily as this, I don't mind calling on you to believe that he was ready
for a good broad field of strange appearances, and that nothing between a
baby and rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.
Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by any means
prepared for nothing; and, consequently, when the Bell struck One, and no
shape appeared, he was taken with a violent fit of trembling. Five
minutes, ten minutes, a quater 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 chesnuts,
cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense
twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with
their delicious steam. In easy state upon this couch, there sat a jolly
Giant, glorious to see: who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike
Plenty's horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on Scrooge, as
he came peeping round the door.
``Come in!'' exclaimed the Ghost. ``Come in. and know me better, man!''
Scrooge entered timidly, and hung his head before this Spirit. He was
not the dogged Scrooge he had been; and though the Spirit's eyes were
clear and kind, he did not like to meet them.
``I am the Ghost of Christmas Present,'' said the Spirit. ``Look upon
me!''
Scrooge reverently did so. It was clothed in one simple green robe, or
mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the
figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded
or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds
of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering
than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark
brown curls were long and free: free as its genial face, its sparkling
eye, its open hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its
joyful air. Girded round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword
was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.
``You have never seen the like of me before!'' exclaimed the Spirit.
``Never,'' Scrooge made answer to it.
``Have never walked forth with the younger members of my family;
meaning (for I am very young) my elder brothers born in these later
years?'' pursued the Phantom.
``I don't think I have,'' said Scrooge. ``I am afraid I have not. Have
you had many brothers, Spirit?''
``More than eighteen hundred,'' said the Ghost.
``A tremendous family to provide for!'' muttered Scrooge.
The Ghost of Christmas Present rose.
``Spirit,'' said Scrooge submissively, ``conduct me where you will. I
went forth last night on compulsion, and I learnt a lesson which is
working now. To-night, if you have aught to teach me, let me profit by
it.''
``Touch my robe!''
Scrooge did as he was told, and held it fast.
Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, 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 recrossed 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 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 chesnuts, 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, squab 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 baker' 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 out 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 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 ``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 chesnuts 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 chesnuts 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 wn 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 a-bed 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 chesnuts and the jug went
round and round; and bye 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 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. 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, 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 si 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 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 skaiter, 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 them 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 any thing 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 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 boarding 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 faultered 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, 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 ``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 shok 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 courts,'' 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,
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.
Chapter 2 - The First of the Three Spirits
Chapter 3 - The Second of the Three Spirits
Chapter 4 - The Last of the Spirits
Ebenezer Scrooge.
``Am I that man who lay upon the bed?'' he cried, upon
his knees.
The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.
``No, Spirit! Oh no, no!''
The finger still was there.
``Spirit!'' he cried, tight clutching at its robe, ``hear me! I am not
the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this
intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?''
For the first time the hand appeared to shake.
``Good Spirit,'' he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it:
``Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may
change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!''
The kind hand trembled.
``I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year.
I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all
Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they
teach. Oh, tell me I may sponge away the writing on this stone!''
In his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to free itself,
but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it. The Spirit, stronger
yet, repulsed him.
Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate reversed, he saw
an alteration in the Phantom's hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and
dwindled down into a bedpost.
Chapter 5 - The End of it
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 school-boy. I am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to
every-body! 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 fire-place. ``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 briliant 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 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.
``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 irection 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!''
``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