A CHRISTMAS CAROL
PART 3
[Scrooge
seeks the origin of a strange ghostly light which seems to emanate from the
next room.]
It was his own room. There was no doubt about that.
But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls and ceiling were so
hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove; from every part of
which, bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe,
and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been
scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney, as that
dull petrification of a hearth had never known in Scrooge’s time, or Marley’s,
or for many and many a winter season gone. Heaped up on the floor, to form a
kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of
meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings,
barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges,
luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that made
the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy state upon this couch,
there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to see; who bore a glowing torch, in shape
not unlike Plenty’s horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on
Scrooge, as he came peeping round the door.
“Come in!” exclaimed the Ghost. “Come in! and know
me better, man!”
Scrooge entered timidly, and hung his head before
this Spirit. He was not the dogged Scrooge he had been; and though the Spirit’s
eyes were clear and kind, he did not like to meet them.
“I am the Ghost of Christmas Present,” said the
Spirit. “Look upon me!”
Scrooge reverently did so. It was clothed in one
simple green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment hung so
loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to
be warded or concealed by any artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample
folds of the garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering
than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark brown
curls were long and free; free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open
hand, its cheery voice, its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. Girded
round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword was in it, and the
ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.
“You have never seen the like of me before!”
exclaimed the Spirit.
“Never,” Scrooge made answer to it.
“Have never walked forth with the younger members
of my family; meaning (for I am very young) my elder brothers born in these
later years?” pursued the Phantom.
“I don’t think I have,” said Scrooge. “I am afraid
I have not. Have you had many brothers, Spirit?”
“More than eighteen hundred,” said the Ghost.
“A tremendous family to provide for!” muttered
Scrooge.
The Ghost of Christmas Present rose.
“Spirit,” said Scrooge submissively, “conduct me
where you will. I went forth last night on compulsion, and I learnt a lesson
which is working now. To-night, if you have aught to teach me, let me profit by
it.”
“Touch my robe!”
Scrooge did as he was told, and held it fast.
Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese,
game, poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings, fruit, and
punch, all vanished instantly. So did the room, the fire, the ruddy glow, the
hour of night, and they stood in the city streets on Christmas morning, where
(for the weather was severe) the people made a rough, but brisk and not
unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the pavement in front of
their dwellings, and from the tops of their houses, whence it was mad delight
to the boys to see it come plumping down into the road below, and splitting
into artificial little snow-storms.
The house fronts looked black enough, and the
windows blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow upon the
roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon the ground; which last deposit had been
ploughed up in deep furrows by the heavy wheels of carts and waggons; furrows
that crossed and re-crossed each other hundreds of times where the great
streets branched off; and made intricate channels, hard to trace in the thick
yellow mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy, and the shortest streets were
choked up with a dingy mist, half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles
descended in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great Britain
had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away to their dear hearts’
content. There was nothing very cheerful in the climate or the town, and yet
was there an air of cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and
brightest summer sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.
For, the people who were shovelling away on the
housetops were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another from the
parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious snowball—better-natured
missile far than many a wordy jest—laughing heartily if it went right and not
less heartily if it went wrong. The poulterers’ shops were still half open, and
the fruiterers’ were radiant in their glory. There were great, round,
pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old
gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their
apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish
Onions, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking
from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced
demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were pears and apples, clustered high
in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers’
benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people’s mouths might water
gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy and brown,
recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant
shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins,
squat and swarthy, setting off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in
the great compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and
beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after dinner. The very
gold and silver fish, set forth among these choice fruits in a bowl, though
members of a dull and stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was
something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and round their little
world in slow and passionless excitement.
The Grocers’! oh, the Grocers’! nearly closed, with
perhaps two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such glimpses! It was
not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that
the twine and roller parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were
rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended scents of
tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the raisins were so
plentiful and rare, the almonds so extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so
long and straight, the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked
and spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and
subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs were moist and pulpy, or that
the French plums blushed in modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes,
or that everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but the
customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day,
that they tumbled up against each other at the door, crashing their wicker
baskets wildly, and left their purchases upon the counter, and came running
back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in the best
humour possible; while the Grocer and his people were so frank and fresh that
the polished hearts with which they fastened their aprons behind might have
been their own, worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas daws to
peck at if they chose.
But soon the steeples called good people all, to
church and chapel, and away they came, flocking through the streets in their
best clothes, and with their gayest faces. And at the same time there emerged
from scores of bye-streets, lanes, and nameless turnings, innumerable people,
carrying their dinners to the bakers’ shops. The sight of these poor revellers
appeared to interest the Spirit very much, for he stood with Scrooge beside him
in a baker’s doorway, and taking off the covers as their bearers passed,
sprinkled incense on their dinners from his torch. And it was a very uncommon
kind of torch, for once or twice when there were angry words between some
dinner-carriers who had jostled each other, he shed a few drops of water on
them from it, and their good humour was restored directly. For they said, it
was a shame to quarrel upon Christmas Day. And so it was! God love it, so it
was!
In time the bells ceased, and the bakers were shut
up; and yet there was a genial shadowing forth of all these dinners and the
progress of their cooking, in the thawed blotch of wet above each baker’s oven;
where the pavement smoked as if its stones were cooking too.
“Is there a peculiar flavour in what you sprinkle
from your torch?” asked Scrooge.
“There is. My own.”
“Would it apply to any kind of dinner on this day?”
asked Scrooge.
“To any kindly given. To a poor one most.”
“Why to a poor one most?” asked Scrooge.
“Because it needs it most.”
“Spirit,” said Scrooge, after a moment’s thought,
“I wonder you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should desire to
cramp these people’s opportunities of innocent enjoyment.”
“I!” cried the Spirit.
“You would deprive them of their means of dining
every seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said to dine at
all,” said Scrooge. “Wouldn’t you?”
“I!” cried the Spirit.
“You seek to close these places on the Seventh
Day?” said Scrooge. “And it comes to the same thing.”
“I seek!” exclaimed the Spirit.
“Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your
name, or at least in that of your family,” said Scrooge.
“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned
the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion,
pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as
strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that,
and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”
Scrooge promised that he would; and they went on,
invisible, as they had been before, into the suburbs of the town. It was a
remarkable quality of the Ghost (which Scrooge had observed at the baker’s),
that notwithstanding his gigantic size, he could accommodate himself to any
place with ease; and that he stood beneath a low roof quite as gracefully and
like a supernatural creature, as it was possible he could have done in any
lofty hall.
And perhaps it was the pleasure the good Spirit had
in showing off this power of his, or else it was his own kind, generous, hearty
nature, and his sympathy with all poor men, that led him straight to Scrooge’s
clerk’s; for there he went, and took Scrooge with him, holding to his robe; and
on the threshold of the door the Spirit smiled, and stopped to bless Bob
Cratchit’s dwelling with the sprinkling of his torch. Think of that! Bob had
but fifteen “Bob” a-week himself; he pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies
of his Christian name; and yet the Ghost of Christmas Present blessed his
four-roomed house!
Then up rose Mrs. Cratchit, Cratchit’s wife,
dressed out but poorly in a twice-turned gown, but brave in ribbons, which are
cheap and make a goodly show for sixpence; and she laid the cloth, assisted by
Belinda Cratchit, second of her daughters, also brave in ribbons; while Master
Peter Cratchit plunged a fork into the saucepan of potatoes, and getting the
corners of his monstrous shirt collar (Bob’s private property, conferred upon
his son and heir in honour of the day) into his mouth, rejoiced to find himself
so gallantly attired, and yearned to show his linen in the fashionable Parks.
And now two smaller Cratchits, boy and girl, came tearing in, screaming that
outside the baker’s they had smelt the goose, and known it for their own; and
basking in luxurious thoughts of sage and onion, these young Cratchits danced
about the table, and exalted Master Peter Cratchit to the skies, while he (not
proud, although his collars nearly choked him) blew the fire, until the slow
potatoes bubbling up, knocked loudly at the saucepan-lid to be let out and peeled.
“What has ever got your precious father then?” said
Mrs. Cratchit. “And your brother, Tiny Tim! And Martha warn’t as late last
Christmas Day by half-an-hour?”
“Here’s Martha, mother!” said a girl, appearing as
she spoke.
“Here’s Martha, mother!” cried the two young
Cratchits. “Hurrah! There’s such a goose, Martha!”
“Why, bless your heart alive, my dear, how late you
are!” said Mrs. Cratchit, kissing her a dozen times, and taking off her shawl
and bonnet for her with officious zeal.
“We’d a deal of work to finish up last night,”
replied the girl, “and had to clear away this morning, mother!”
“Well! Never mind so long as you are come,” said
Mrs. Cratchit. “Sit ye down before the fire, my dear, and have a warm, Lord
bless ye!”
“No, no! There’s father coming,” cried the two
young Cratchits, who were everywhere at once. “Hide, Martha, hide!”
So Martha hid herself, and in came little Bob, the
father, with at least three feet of comforter exclusive of the fringe, hanging
down before him; and his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed, to look
seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little
crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame!
“Why, where’s our Martha?” cried Bob Cratchit,
looking round.
“Not coming,” said Mrs. Cratchit.
“Not coming!” said Bob, with a sudden declension in
his high spirits; for he had been Tim’s blood horse all the way from church,
and had come home rampant. “Not coming upon Christmas Day!”
Martha didn’t like to see him disappointed, if it
were only in joke; so she came out prematurely from behind the closet door, and
ran into his arms, while the two young Cratchits hustled Tiny Tim, and bore him
off into the wash-house, that he might hear the pudding singing in the copper.
“And how did little Tim behave?” asked Mrs.
Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his
daughter to his heart’s content.
“As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow
he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things
you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in
the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to
remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”
Bob’s voice was tremulous when he told them this,
and trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing strong and hearty.
His active little crutch was heard upon the floor,
and back came Tiny Tim before another word was spoken, escorted by his brother
and sister to his stool before the fire; and while Bob, turning up his cuffs—as
if, poor fellow, they were capable of being made more shabby—compounded some
hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and stirred it round and round and
put it on the hob to simmer; Master Peter, and the two ubiquitous young
Cratchits went to fetch the goose, with which they soon returned in high procession.
Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a
goose the rarest of all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a black swan
was a matter of course—and in truth it was something very like it in that
house. Mrs. Cratchit made the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan)
hissing hot; Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigour; Miss
Belinda sweetened up the apple-sauce; Martha dusted the hot plates; Bob took
Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny corner at the table; the two young Cratchits set
chairs for everybody, not forgetting themselves, and mounting guard upon their
posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest they should shriek for goose
before their turn came to be helped. At last the dishes were set on, and grace
was said. It was succeeded by a breathless pause, as Mrs. Cratchit, looking
slowly all along the carving-knife, prepared to plunge it in the breast; but
when she did, and when the long expected gush of stuffing issued forth, one
murmur of delight arose all round the board, and even Tiny Tim, excited by the
two young Cratchits, beat on the table with the handle of his knife, and feebly
cried Hurrah!
There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn’t
believe there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and flavour, size
and cheapness, were the themes of universal admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce
and mashed potatoes, it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed,
as Mrs. Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small atom of a bone
upon the dish), they hadn’t ate it all at last! Yet every one had had enough,
and the youngest Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to the
eyebrows! But now, the plates being changed by Miss Belinda, Mrs. Cratchit left
the room alone—too nervous to bear witnesses—to take the pudding up and bring
it in.
Suppose it should not be done enough! Suppose it
should break in turning out! Suppose somebody should have got over the wall of
the back-yard, and stolen it, while they were merry with the goose—a supposition
at which the two young Cratchits became livid! All sorts of horrors were
supposed.
Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out
of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an
eating-house and a pastrycook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s
next door to that! That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit
entered—flushed, but smiling proudly—with the pudding, like a speckled
cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited
brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.
Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and
calmly too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by Mrs.
Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs. Cratchit said that now the weight was off
her mind, she would confess she had had her doubts about the quantity of flour.
Everybody had something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it was at
all a small pudding for a large family. It would have been flat heresy to do
so. Any Cratchit would have blushed to hint at such a thing.
At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was
cleared, the hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the jug being
tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges were put upon the table, and
a shovel-full of chestnuts on the fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew round
the hearth, in what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one; and at
Bob Cratchit’s elbow stood the family display of glass. Two tumblers, and a
custard-cup without a handle.
These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as
well as golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with beaming
looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and cracked noisily. Then Bob
proposed:
“A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless
us!”
Which all the family re-echoed.
“God bless us every one!” said Tiny Tim, the last
of all.
He sat very close to his father’s side upon his
little stool. Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he loved the
child, and wished to keep him by his side, and dreaded that he might be taken
from him.
“Spirit,” said Scrooge, with an interest he had
never felt before, “tell me if Tiny Tim will live.”
“I see a vacant seat,” replied the Ghost, “in the
poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If
these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, the child will die.”
“No, no,” said Scrooge. “Oh, no, kind Spirit! say
he will be spared.”
“If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future,
none other of my race,” returned the Ghost, “will find him here. What then? If
he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted
by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.
“Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not
adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus
is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die?
It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to
live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on
the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the
dust!”
Scrooge bent before the Ghost’s rebuke, and
trembling cast his eyes upon the ground. But he raised them speedily, on
hearing his own name.
“Mr. Scrooge!” said Bob; “I’ll give you Mr. Scrooge,
the Founder of the Feast!”
“The Founder of the Feast indeed!” cried Mrs.
Cratchit, reddening. “I wish I had him here. I’d give him a piece of my mind to
feast upon, and I hope he’d have a good appetite for it.”
“My dear,” said Bob, “the children! Christmas Day.”
“It should be Christmas Day, I am sure,” said she,
“on which one drinks the health of such an odious, stingy, hard, unfeeling man
as Mr. Scrooge. You know he is, Robert! Nobody knows it better than you do,
poor fellow!”
“My dear,” was Bob’s mild answer, “Christmas Day.”
“I’ll drink his health for your sake and the
Day’s,” said Mrs. Cratchit, “not for his. Long life to him! A merry Christmas
and a happy new year! He’ll be very merry and very happy, I have no doubt!”
The children drank the toast after her. It was the
first of their proceedings which had no heartiness. Tiny Tim drank it last of
all, but he didn’t care twopence for it. Scrooge was the Ogre of the family.
The mention of his name cast a dark shadow on the party, which was not
dispelled for full five minutes.
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 After it had passed
away, they were ten times merrier than before, from the mere relief of young
Cratchits laughed tremendously at the idea of Peter’s being a man of business;
and Peter himself looked thoughtfully at the fire from between his collars, as
if he were deliberating what particular investments he should favour when he
came into the receipt of that bewildering income. Martha, who was a poor
apprentice at a milliner’s, then told them what kind of work she had to do, and
how many hours she worked at a stretch, and how she meant to lie abed to-morrow
morning for a good long rest; to-morrow being a holiday she passed at home.
Also how she had seen a countess and a lord some days before, and how the lord
“was much about as tall as Peter;” at which Peter pulled up his collars so high
that you couldn’t have seen his head if you had been there. All this time the
chestnuts and the jug went round and round; and by-and-bye they had a song,
about a lost child travelling in the snow, from Tiny Tim, who had a plaintive
little voice, and sang it very well indeed.
There was nothing of high mark in this. They were
not a handsome family; they were not well dressed; their shoes were far from
being water-proof; their clothes were scanty; and Peter might have known, and
very likely did, the inside of a pawnbroker’s. But, they were happy, grateful,
pleased with one another, and contented with the time; and when they faded, and
looked happier yet in the bright sprinklings of the Spirit’s torch at parting,
Scrooge had his eye upon them, and especially on Tiny Tim, until the last.
By this time it was getting dark, and snowing
pretty heavily; and as Scrooge and the Spirit went along the streets, the
brightness of the roaring fires in kitchens, parlours, and all sorts of rooms,
was wonderful. Here, the flickering of the blaze showed preparations for a cosy
dinner, with hot plates baking through and through before the fire, and deep
red curtains, ready to be drawn to shut out cold and darkness. There all the
children of the house were running out into the snow to meet their married
sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts, and be the first to greet them.
Here, again, were shadows on the window-blind of guests assembling; and there a
group of handsome girls, all hooded and fur-booted, and all chattering at once,
tripped lightly off to some near neighbour’s house; where, woe upon the single
man who saw them enter—artful witches, well they knew it—in a glow!
But, if you had judged from the numbers of people
on their way to friendly gatherings, you might have thought that no one was at
home to give them welcome when they got there, instead of every house expecting
company, and piling up its fires half-chimney high. Blessings on it, how the
Ghost exulted! How it bared its breadth of breast, and opened its capacious
palm, and floated on, outpouring, with a generous hand, its bright and harmless
mirth on everything within its reach! The very lamplighter, who ran on before,
dotting the dusky street with specks of light, and who was dressed to spend the
evening somewhere, laughed out loudly as the Spirit passed, though little
kenned the lamplighter that he had any company but Christmas!
And now, without a word of warning from the Ghost,
they stood upon a bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses of rude stone
were cast about, as though it were the burial-place of giants; and water spread
itself wheresoever it listed, or would have done so, but for the frost that
held it prisoner; and nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse rank grass.
Down in the west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery red, which glared
upon the desolation for an instant, like a sullen eye, and frowning lower,
lower, lower yet, was lost in the thick gloom of darkest night.
“What place is this?” asked Scrooge.
“A place where Miners live, who labour in the
bowels of the earth,” returned the Spirit. “But they know me. See!”
A light shone from the window of a hut, and swiftly
they advanced towards it. Passing through the wall of mud and stone, they found
a cheerful company assembled round a glowing fire. An old, old man and woman,
with their children and their children’s children, and another generation
beyond that, all decked out gaily in their holiday attire. The old man, in a
voice that seldom rose above the howling of the wind upon the barren waste, was
singing them a Christmas song—it had been a very old song when he was a boy—and
from time to time they all joined in the chorus. So surely as they raised their
voices, the old man got quite blithe and loud; and so surely as they stopped,
his vigour sank again.
The Spirit did not tarry here, but bade Scrooge
hold his robe, and passing on above the moor, sped—whither? Not to sea? To sea.
To Scrooge’s horror, looking back, he saw the last of the land, a frightful range
of rocks, behind them; and his ears were deafened by the thundering of water,
as it rolled and roared, and raged among the dreadful caverns it had worn, and
fiercely tried to undermine the earth.
Built upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some
league or so from shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed, the wild year
through, there stood a solitary lighthouse. Great heaps of sea-weed clung to
its base, and storm-birds—born of the wind one might suppose, as sea-weed of
the water—rose and fell about it, like the waves they skimmed.
But even here, two men who watched the light had
made a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed out a ray
of brightness on the awful sea. Joining their horny hands over the rough table
at which they sat, they wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog;
and one of them: the elder, too, with his face all damaged and scarred with
hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship might be: struck up a sturdy
song that was like a Gale in itself.
Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and
heaving sea—on, on—until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any shore,
they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman at the wheel, the
look-out in the bow, the officers who had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in
their several stations; but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or
had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his companion of some
bygone Christmas Day, with homeward hopes belonging to it. And every man on
board, waking or sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another on
that day than on any day in the year; and had shared to some extent in its
festivities; and had remembered those he cared for at a distance, and had known
that they delighted to remember him.
It was a great surprise to Scrooge, while listening
to the moaning of the wind, and thinking what a solemn thing it was to move on
through the lonely darkness over an unknown abyss, whose depths were secrets as
profound as Death: it was a great surprise to Scrooge, while thus engaged, to
hear a hearty laugh. It was a much greater surprise to Scrooge to recognise it
as his own nephew’s and to find himself in a bright, dry, gleaming room, with
the Spirit standing smiling by his side, and looking at that same nephew with
approving affability!
“Ha, ha!” laughed Scrooge’s nephew. “Ha, ha, ha!”
If you should happen, by any unlikely chance, to
know a man more blest in a laugh than Scrooge’s nephew, all I can say is, I
should like to know him too. Introduce him to me, and I’ll cultivate his
acquaintance.
It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of
things, that while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing
in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and good-humour. When
Scrooge’s nephew laughed in this way: holding his sides, rolling his head, and
twisting his face into the most extravagant contortions: Scrooge’s niece, by
marriage, laughed as heartily as he. And their assembled friends being not a
bit behindhand, roared out lustily.
“Ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!”
“He said that Christmas was a humbug, as I live!”
cried Scrooge’s nephew. “He believed it too!”
“More shame for him, Fred!” said Scrooge’s niece,
indignantly. Bless those women; they never do anything by halves. They are always
in earnest.
She was very pretty: exceedingly pretty. With a
dimpled, surprised-looking, capital face; a ripe little mouth, that seemed made
to be kissed—as no doubt it was; all kinds of good little dots about her chin,
that melted into one another when she laughed; and the sunniest pair of eyes
you ever saw in any little creature’s head. Altogether she was what you would
have called provoking, you know; but satisfactory, too. Oh, perfectly
satisfactory.
“He’s a comical old fellow,” said Scrooge’s nephew,
“that’s the truth: and not so pleasant as he might be. However, his offences
carry their own punishment, and I have nothing to say against him.”
“I’m sure he is very rich, Fred,” hinted Scrooge’s
niece. “At least you always tell me so.”
“What of that, my dear!” said Scrooge’s nephew.
“His wealth is of no use to him. He don’t do any good with it. He don’t make
himself comfortable with it. He hasn’t the satisfaction of thinking—ha, ha,
ha!—that he is ever going to benefit US with it.”
“I have no patience with him,” observed Scrooge’s
niece. Scrooge’s niece’s sisters, and all the other ladies, expressed the same
opinion.
“Oh, I have!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “I am sorry
for him; I couldn’t be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers by his ill whims!
Himself, always. Here, he takes it into his head to dislike us, and he won’t
come and dine with us. What’s the consequence? He don’t lose much of a dinner.”
“Indeed, I think he loses a very good dinner,”
interrupted Scrooge’s niece. Everybody else said the same, and they must be
allowed to have been competent judges, because they had just had dinner; and,
with the dessert upon the table, were clustered round the fire, by lamplight.
“Well! I’m very glad to hear it,” said Scrooge’s
nephew, “because I haven’t great faith in these young housekeepers. What do you
say, Topper?”
Topper had clearly got his eye upon one of
Scrooge’s niece’s sisters, for he answered that a bachelor was a wretched
outcast, who had no right to express an opinion on the subject. Whereat
Scrooge’s niece’s sister—the plump one with the lace tucker: not the one with
the roses—blushed.
“Do go on, Fred,” said Scrooge’s niece, clapping
her hands. “He never finishes what he begins to say! He is such a ridiculous
fellow!”
Scrooge’s nephew revelled in another laugh, and as
it was impossible to keep the infection off; though the plump sister tried hard
to do it with aromatic vinegar; his example was unanimously followed.
“I was only going to say,” said Scrooge’s nephew,
“that the consequence of his taking a dislike to us, and not making merry with
us, is, as I think, that he loses some pleasant moments, which could do him no
harm. I am sure he loses pleasanter companions than he can find in his own
thoughts, either in his mouldy old office, or his dusty chambers. I mean to
give him the same chance every year, whether he likes it or not, for I pity
him. He may rail at Christmas till he dies, but he can’t help thinking better
of it—I defy him—if he finds me going there, in good temper, year after year,
and saying Uncle Scrooge, how are you? If it only puts him in the vein to leave
his poor clerk fifty pounds, that’s something; and I think I shook him
yesterday.”
It was their turn to laugh now at the notion of his
shaking Scrooge. But being thoroughly good-natured, and not much caring what
they laughed at, so that they laughed at any rate, he encouraged them in their
merriment, and passed the bottle joyously.
After tea, they had some music. For they were a
musical family, and knew what they were about, when they sung a Glee or Catch,
I can assure you: especially Topper, who could growl away in the bass like a
good one, and never swell the large veins in his forehead, or get red in the
face over it. Scrooge’s niece played well upon the harp; and played among other
tunes a simple little air (a mere nothing: you might learn to whistle it in two
minutes), which had been familiar to the child who fetched Scrooge from the
boarding-school, as he had been reminded by the Ghost of Christmas Past. When
this strain of music sounded, all the things that Ghost had shown him, came
upon his mind; he softened more and more; and thought that if he could have
listened to it often, years ago, he might have cultivated the kindnesses of
life for his own happiness with his own hands, without resorting to the
sexton’s spade that buried Jacob Marley.
But they didn’t devote the whole evening to music.
After a while they played at forfeits; for it is good to be children sometimes,
and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty Founder was a child
himself. Stop! There was first a game at blind-man’s buff. Of course there was.
And I no more believe Topper was really blind than I believe he had eyes in his
boots. My opinion is, that it was a done thing between him and Scrooge’s
nephew; and that the Ghost of Christmas Present knew it. The way he went after
that plump sister in the lace tucker, was an outrage on the credulity of human
nature. Knocking down the fire-irons, tumbling over the chairs, bumping against
the piano, smothering himself among the curtains, wherever she went, there went
he! He always knew where the plump sister was. He wouldn’t catch anybody else.
If you had fallen up against him (as some of them did), on purpose, he would
have made a feint of endeavouring to seize you, which would have been an
affront to your understanding, and would instantly have sidled off in the
direction of the plump sister. She often cried out that it wasn’t fair; and it
really was not. But when at last, he caught her; when, in spite of all her
silken rustlings, and her rapid flutterings past him, he got her into a corner
whence there was no escape; then his conduct was the most execrable. For his
pretending not to know her; his pretending that it was necessary to touch her
head-dress, and further to assure himself of her identity by pressing a certain
ring upon her finger, and a certain chain about her neck; was vile, monstrous!
No doubt she told him her opinion of it, when, another blind-man being in
office, they were so very confidential together, behind the curtains.
Scrooge’s niece was not one of the blind-man’s buff
party, but was made comfortable with a large chair and a footstool, in a snug
corner, where the Ghost and Scrooge were close behind her. But she joined in
the forfeits, and loved her love to admiration with all the letters of the
alphabet. Likewise at the game of How, When, and Where, she was very great, and
to the secret joy of Scrooge’s nephew, beat her sisters hollow: though they
were sharp girls too, as Topper could have told you. There might have been
twenty people there, young and old, but they all played, and so did Scrooge;
for wholly forgetting in the interest he had in what was going on, that his
voice made no sound in their ears, he sometimes came out with his guess quite
loud, and very often guessed quite right, too; for the sharpest needle, best
Whitechapel, warranted not to cut in the eye, was not sharper than Scrooge;
blunt as he took it in his head to be.
The Ghost was greatly pleased to find him in this
mood, and looked upon him with such favour, that he begged like a boy to be
allowed to stay until the guests departed. But this the Spirit said could not
be done.
“Here is a new game,” said Scrooge. “One half hour,
Spirit, only one!”
It was a Game called Yes and No, where Scrooge’s
nephew had to think of something, and the rest must find out what; he only
answering to their questions yes or no, as the case was. The brisk fire of
questioning to which he was exposed, elicited from him that he was thinking of
an animal, a live animal, rather a disagreeable animal, a savage animal, an
animal that growled and grunted sometimes, and talked sometimes, and lived in
London, and walked about the streets, and wasn’t made a show of, and wasn’t led
by anybody, and didn’t live in a menagerie, and was never killed in a market,
and was not a horse, or an ass, or a cow, or a bull, or a tiger, or a dog, or a
pig, or a cat, or a bear. At every fresh question that was put to him, this
nephew burst into a fresh roar of laughter; and was so inexpressibly tickled,
that he was obliged to get up off the sofa and stamp. At last the plump sister,
falling into a similar state, cried out:
“I have found it out! I know what it is, Fred! I
know what it is!”
“What is it?” cried Fred.
“It’s your Uncle Scro-o-o-o-oge!”
Which it certainly was. Admiration was the
universal sentiment, though some objected that the reply to “Is it a bear?”
ought to have been “Yes;” inasmuch as an answer in the negative was sufficient
to have diverted their thoughts from Mr. Scrooge, supposing they had ever had any
tendency that way.
“He has given us plenty of merriment, I am sure,”
said Fred, “and it would be ungrateful not to drink his health. Here is a glass
of mulled wine ready to our hand at the moment; and I say, ‘Uncle
Scrooge!’ ”
“Well! Uncle Scrooge!” they cried.
“A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to the old
man, whatever he is!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “He wouldn’t take it from me, but
may he have it, nevertheless. Uncle Scrooge!”
Uncle Scrooge had imperceptibly become so gay and
light of heart, that he would have pledged the unconscious company in return,
and thanked them in an inaudible speech, if the Ghost had given him time. But
the whole scene passed off in the breath of the last word spoken by his nephew;
and he and the Spirit were again upon their travels.
Much they saw, and far they went, and many homes
they visited, but always with a happy end. The Spirit stood beside sick beds,
and they were cheerful; on foreign lands, and they were close at home; by
struggling men, and they were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it
was rich. In almshouse, hospital, and jail, in misery’s every refuge, where
vain man in his little brief authority had not made fast the door, and barred
the Spirit out, he left his blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts.
It was a long night, if it were only a night; but
Scrooge had his doubts of this, because the Christmas Holidays appeared to be
condensed into the space of time they passed together. It was strange, too,
that while Scrooge remained unaltered in his outward form, the Ghost grew
older, clearly older. Scrooge had observed this change, but never spoke of it,
until they left a children’s Twelfth Night party, when, looking at the Spirit
as they stood together in an open place, he noticed that its hair was grey.
“Are spirits’ lives so short?” asked Scrooge.
“My life upon this globe, is very brief,” replied
the Ghost. “It ends to-night.”
“To-night!” cried Scrooge.
“To-night at midnight. Hark! The time is drawing
near.”
The chimes were ringing the three quarters past
eleven at that moment.
“Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask,”
said Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit’s robe, “but I see something
strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a
foot or a claw?”
“It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon
it,” was the Spirit’s sorrowful reply. “Look here.”
From the foldings of its robe, it brought two
children; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt down at
its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.
“Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!”
exclaimed the Ghost.
They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged,
scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth
should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest
tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted
them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned,
devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no
perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful
creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown
to him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but the words
choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie of such enormous magnitude.
“Spirit! are they yours?” Scrooge could say no
more.
“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down
upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is
Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but
most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom,
unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its
hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your
factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”
“Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.
“Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on
him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”
The bell struck twelve.
to be continued
