The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge (2 page)

Let us consider Scrooge as he recedes into the unremitting glare of the summer sun. He seems a living oxymoron. Once a wealthy man who dressed in a pauper's threadbare black, he can now count twopence to his name yet wears a waistcoat embroidered in such exquisite colours that, were it not for his strange behaviour, one might take him for some lord or baron. There are those who mistake him, in his festive attire, for a well-known
writer, a certain Mr. Dickens, who is known for his eccentricities of dress, and were Scrooge's hair a bit less white and his beard a bit more full the resemblance would have been close enough to fool any casual observer. On closer inspection, however, we find that Scrooge's attire, though festive, is dis tinc tly out of date, and shows such signs of wear as might be seen in the garb of one whose riches are but a distant memory.

The heat and the haze thickened so, people slowed their gait to a near crawl as they made their way through the streets. Gentlemen carried hats only to fan their florid faces; ladies were not seen about at all. Newsboys sought out what slivers of shadow the cruel sun had overlooked; horses dreamed of crisp air and open spaces and pawed at the ground as if it might contain some hidden well of coolness. The ancient tower of a church became all but invisible in the grimy haze and when its old bell struck the hours and the quarters, the sound was muffled by the very air, as if someone had wrapped a cloak about the clapper.

The offices of Scrooge and Cratchit were in an altogether less savoury area of London than the bank of Messrs. Pleasant and Portly—a neighbourhood where the streets and doorways were narrow, where the “finery” of the local inhabitants was more likely to consist of rags than of silk, and where the stench of humanity, ripened by the harsh summer sun, was such that
decency prohibits describing it. Here, in the larger of two rooms—the smaller being really no more than a cupboard—Bob Cratchit toiled away. Sometimes people new to London called Cratchit Scrooge, a misappellation that invariably caused amusement amongst the neighbours (for the firm was located on a street so narrow that its tenants enjoyed few secrets). Anyone who had lived in the neighbourhood for more than a fortnight, even if he had not met Scrooge, knew of him, and no one who knew of him could possibly mistake the one partner, grimly adding and subtracting figures with barely a mutter and with a brow as tightly knit as the weave of the finest cloth on Savile Row, for the other.

The other—that is, Ebenezer Scrooge—made his way briskly through the streets, scattering crowds of workers bound from their stifling offices to their stifling lodgings with his regular shouts of “Merry Christmas!” punctuated occasionally by an equally inappropriate “And a Happy New Year!” When one unsuspecting clerk stopped Scrooge to enquire about this odd greeting, the New Year being, in the mind of the clerk, some six months distant, Scrooge replied that the calendar was an arbitrary governor of a man's life and that the year began anew whenever one decided to live his life in a new way. The clerk managed to escape before Scrooge could
explain just how this change might be effected, but his disappearance made not the slightest difference in Scrooge's holiday temper. Only a few steps on, he paused before the open door of an office to regale the occupants with a Christmas carol, but at the first sound of

“God Bless you merry, gentlemen!

May nothing you dismay”

the door was slammed with such energy of action that even Scrooge came close to flinching before he toddled off down the road.

Just as the hour for shutting up the countinghouse arrived, so did Scrooge, strolling through the open door with his usual goodwill.

“You should take the day off tomorrow,” he said, as Cratchit dismounted from his stool. “Spend some time with your little grandson. I'm sure young Timothy would find it quite convenient.”

“I don't find it convenient,” replied Cratchit in the tone of a parent attempting for the hundredth time to disabuse a stubborn child of a ridiculous notion. “And I don't find it fair. If I did such a thing and failed to reduce my salary by half a crown, I'd think the firm ill-used.”

“And yet,” said Scrooge, “you don't think the firm ill-used when I draw a day's wages for an hour's copying letters and seven more wandering about the city wishing strangers a merry Christmas.”

Cratchit observed that, whilst this was a bit unfair, it happened only about once a week.

“A poor excuse for picking your pocket,” said Scrooge. “If it eases your conscience, you may come in all the earlier the next day.”

Cratchit remarked that he would be of little help to his grandson if he were not careful to see the firm remained profitable and that he fully intended to arrive at an early hour the next morning; he flinched only moderately when, as he left, Scrooge bellowed after him, “Merry Christmas!” Cratchit, after all, was used to it.

The office was closed in a moment, and Scrooge walked with a lightness in his step, puzzling to other pedestrians weighed down by the heat, to a nearby tavern. There he settled in to read the papers and to take his evening meal in a room which anyone else on such a day would have called stuffy but which Scrooge thought of as cosy. The tavern keeper had learned long ago that whatever Scrooge took for dinner (tonight it was mutton), he would take Christmas pudding with it, and so that concoction had been prepared in
anticipation of Scrooge's arrival. The tavern keeper knew, too, that although Scrooge could rarely afford to pay his bill (tonight was no exception), he was nonetheless good for business; most of London knew that Scrooge dined at this particular tavern, and much of London stopped by now and again for a mug of ale and a chance to gawk at the old fool daintily consuming his Christmas pudding in the long days of summer.

Recall, if you will, Scrooge's lodgings—the lowering pile of a building huddled in the dark corner of a dark yard amongst neighbours which would have seemed decrepit on their own but which, by comparison to the house where Scrooge made his abode, positively gleamed with youth. At the front of the house we find the heavy door with its great knocker, behind that door the flight of stairs wide enough to accommodate a hearse broadside, and at the top of those stairs Scrooge's gloomy suite of rooms: sitting room, bedroom, and lumber room, none furnished with any chattels beyond the necessary. Some things about Scrooge had remained unchanged after his well-publicised transformation two decades ago, amongst them his ascetic domestic arrangements.

The sole exception to this rule stood by the window in the sitting room. Scrooge called it his “German toy,” but to those who glimpsed it from the street below it was merely a Christmas tree. Even in the pale evening light it sparkled and
glittered with bright objects. There were miniature French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, and various other articles of domestic furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at Wolverhampton) perched amongst the boughs; there were jolly broad-faced little men, much more agreeable in appearance than many real men—and no wonder, for their heads came off and showed them to be full of sugarplums; there were fiddles and drums; there were tambourines, books, workboxes, paint boxes, and sweetmeat boxes; there was real fruit, made artificially dazzling with gold leaf; there were imitation apples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises; in short, as a child visitor to Scrooge's rooms once delightedly whispered to her bosom friend, “There is everything, and more.”

In what most of London had come to think of as his former life (that is, the time before the appearance of four ghosts one Christmas Eve transformed his general outlook), Scrooge had derived a substantial augmentation to his income by letting out the other rooms in the building as offices. As then, those rooms were now filled in the daytime with clerks and visited by gentlemen who resembled, in clothing and carriage, the Messrs. Pleasant and Portly; however, Scrooge's income from all this bustling activity could now be expressed in a single syllable: nil. The rooms were now let, on terms that far exceeded liberal, to various charitable societies which attempted, in
their various ways, to fulfill the various needs of London's lowermost classes.

By the time Scrooge returned to the house, the windows were all dark and even the yard was deep in shadow, for the sun had finally been coaxed out of the sky into its briefest retirement of the year. Now, it is a fact that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that, as aforementioned, it was very large. Nonetheless, it was Scrooge's habit, having his key in the lock, to look deep into the shadows that rippled across the surface of the brass. A passing observer might have attributed this behaviour to the acknowledged fact that Scrooge had as much of what is called “fancy” about him as any man in London—including the wittiest actor in the West End and the happiest lunatic in Bedlam. But to Scrooge, the behaviour of the knocker had become an omen, a harbinger of what might await him in his rooms above. On this night, as on many previous nights in the past twenty years, Scrooge saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change, not a knocker, but Marley's face.

Yes, Jacob Marley, once partner in Scrooge's countinghouse but now dead one score and seven years, was in the habit of making periodic appearances in Scrooge's knocker. Tonight his countenance glowed lurid in the evening haze, as if the
sun had not undertaken its brief nocturnal sojourn but still reflected off the polished brass. To anyone else, it would have seemed horrible, but in Scrooge, who knew what the ghostly spectacles and curiously stirred hair portended, Marley's appearance engendered not fear but delight. Scrooge rubbed the knocker, which was once again merely a knocker, with one hand as he turned the key with the other. Chuckling, he entered the dim hall and mounted the stairs, trimming his candle as he went.

Even at that time of year, when the yard without was never truly dark, half a dozen gas lamps out of the street wouldn't have lighted the entry too well, so you may suppose it was pretty dark even with Scrooge's candle.

Up Scrooge bounced, not caring a button for that: Darkness was cheap, and a penny saved in tolerating darkness for himself might subsequently be spent providing light for someone else. As soon as he passed through his door, he eagerly searched his rooms for any evidence that the event foreshadowed in the knocker had already taken place, but found everything in its usual order and himself quite alone. The door to his rooms he left unlocked, as if this would provide a more convenient ingress for his expected visitor. Quite satisfied with this minimal and wholly unnecessary preparation, he took off his cravat and put on his dressing gown and slippers, eschewing
his nightcap in silent sympathy with the rest of London, who, unlike him, suffered from the heat. He sat down before the grate—empty as much because of economy as because of the weather—to read a novel by the flickering light of his taper.

At the end of a chapter in which the youthful hero had walked from London to Dover with little to assuage his hunger or protect him from the elements, Scrooge laid his book upon the table so that he might wipe a tear from his eye, so moved was he by the plight of the fictional boy. He gazed for a moment at the tiles around his fireplace, barely visible in the candlelight. They were designed to illustrate the Scriptures, but Scrooge had come to think of them as unnecessarily focused on violent incidents from the Old Testament. He had, the previous year, thought to replace them with a more fanciful set by an artist whose work he had seen at an exhibition, but on his way to visit the artist he had emptied his pockets to a destitute woman he met in the street (Scrooge often travelled by such streets as were likely to introduce him to such women) and so, having not a farthing with which to commission a fresh set of tiles, he had turned his wanderings in another direction, arriving home without having sought out the artist after all.

Finding the tiles difficult to focus on in the dimness, Scrooge turned his attention to the one object in the room
(besides, some would say, the Christmas tree) that might seem superfluous—a bell pull that hung in the sitting room and communicated for some purpose long forgotten with a chamber in the highest storey of the building. Rising from his chair, he grasped the pull and gently tugged it, knowing that more than the most tentative pressure would surely end what had been an extraordinarily long life for the threadbare pull. At first, the bell scarcely made a sound, but soon it rang loudly, and as if in sympathy, so did every bell in the house.

“Come along, friend,” cried Scrooge, “show yourself! I've no wish to sit up all night, even on so short a night as this.”

Straightaway a clanking began as heavy chains were dragged up the stairs. Satisfied that the bells had done their work, Scrooge settled back into his chair and waited for the arrival of the ghost (for it was none other than Marley's ghost who dragged chains ever closer to Scrooge's apartment). Scrooge had considered Marley no more than a business partner in life; he had come to think of Marley as his dear friend in death and had even taken to calling him by his given name. It was this name he uttered when a momentary flame leapt up in the grate, signaling the ghost's arrival at his door.

“Don't keep a poor old man waiting, Jacob!” he cried with delighted anticipation. “Come in and take a seat.” Scrooge could never say exactly how Marley did come in—he did not
float through the door nor seep under it nor ooze through the keyhole. One moment he was rattling his chains on the landing, and the next he was sitting in the chair opposite Scrooge, his boots propped up on the fender. The phantom brought with him a blast of chill air which would have been welcomed by anyone else in London that night but which had no more effect on Scrooge than the afternoon's swelter had.

Marley's clothes had grown somewhat out of fashion in the years since his death—his pigtail, waistcoat, tights, and boots looked more like a stage costume than a proper businessman's attire. His chain of cashboxes, keys, padlocks, ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel was clasped about his middle. Scrooge thought its length must have diminished over the years, thanks to his friend's good works, but it was still a heavy burden, and Marley seemed glad of the opportunity, however fleeting, to rest.