During the whole of this time, Scrooge had acted like a man out of his wits.His heart and soul were in the scene, and with his former self. He corroborated everything,remembered everything, enjoyed everything, and underwent the strangest agitation.It was not until now, when the bright faces of his former self and Dick were turned from them,that he remembered the Ghost, and became conscious that it was looking full upon him,while the light upon its head burnt very clear.
"A small matter," said the Ghost, "to make these silly folks so full of gratitude."
"Small!" echoed Scrooge.
The Spirit signed to him to listen to the two apprentices,who were pouring out their hearts in praise of Fezziwig: and when he had done so, said,
"Why!Is it not?He has spent but a few pounds of your mortal money: three or four perhaps.Is that so much that he deserves this praise?"
"It isn't that," said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and speaking unconsciously like his former,not his latter, self."It isn't that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy or unhappy;to make our service light or burdensome; a pleasure or a toil.Say that his power lies in words and looks;in things so slight and insignificant that it is impossible to add and count 'em up: what then?The happiness he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune."
He felt the Spirit's glance, and stopped.
"What is the matter?" asked the Ghost.
"Nothing particular," said Scrooge.
"Something, I think?" the Ghost insisted.
"No," said Scrooge, "No. I should like to be able to say a word or two to my clerk just now. That's all."
His former self turned down the lamps as he gave utterance to the wish;and Scrooge and the Ghost again stood side by side in the open air.
"My time grows short," observed the Spirit. "Quick!"
This was not addressed to Scrooge, or to any one whom he could see,but it produced an immediate effect. For again Scrooge saw himself. He was older now;a man in the prime of life. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later years;but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice. There was an eager, greedy,restless motion in the eye, which showed the passion that had taken root,and where the shadow of the growing tree would fall.
He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young girl in a mourning-dress:in whose eyes there were tears, which sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of Christmas Past.
"It matters little," she said, softly. "To you, very little. Another idol has displaced me;and if it can cheer and comfort you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have no just cause to grieve."
"What Idol has displaced you?" he rejoined.
"A golden one."
"This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said."There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty;and there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity as the pursuit of wealth!"
"You fear the world too much," she answered, gently."All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being beyond the chance of its sordid reproach.I have seen your nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion, Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?"
"What then?" he retorted. "Even if I have grown so much wiser, what then?I am not changed towards you."
She shook her head.
"Am I?"
"Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were both poor and content to be so, until,in good season, we could improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You are changed.When it was made, you were another man."
"I was a boy," he said impatiently.
"Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you are," she returned. "I am.That which promised happiness when we were one in heart,is fraught with misery now that we are two. How often and how keenly I have thought of this,I will not say. It is enough that I have thought of it, and can release you."
"Have I ever sought release?"
"In words. No. Never."
"In what, then?"
"In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another atmosphere of life;another Hope as its great end. In everything that made my love of any worth or value in your sight.If this had never been between us," said the girl, looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him;"tell me, would you seek me out and try to win me now?Ah, no!"
He seemed to yield to the justice of this supposition, in spite of himself.But he said with a struggle, "You think not."
"I would gladly think otherwise if I could," she answered,"Heaven knows!When I have learned a Truth like this, I know how strong and irresistible it must be.But if you were free to-day, to-morrow, yesterday,can even I believe that you would choose a dowerless girl--you who,in your very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or, choosing her,if for a moment you were false enough to your one guiding principle to do so,do I not know that your repentance and regret would surely follow?I do; and I release you. With a full heart, for the love of him you once were."
He was about to speak; but with her head turned from him, she resumed.
"You may--the memory of what is past half makes me hope you will--have pain in this. A very,very brief time, and you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as an unprofitable dream,from which it happened well that you awoke. May you be happy in the life you have chosen!"
She left him, and they parted.
"Spirit!" said Scrooge, "show me no more!Conduct me home. Why do you delight to torture me?"
"One shadow more!" exclaimed the Ghost.
"No more!" cried Scrooge. "No more. I don't wish to see it. Show me no more!"
But the relentless Ghost pinioned him in both his arms,and forced him to observe what happened next.
They were in another scene and place; a room, not very large or handsome, but full of comfort.Near to the winter fire sat a beautiful young girl,so like that last that Scrooge believed it was the same, until he saw her, now a comely matron,sitting opposite her daughter. The noise in this room was perfectly tumultuous,for there were more children there, than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind could count; and,unlike the celebrated herd in the poem,they were not forty children conducting themselves like one,but every child was conducting itself like forty. The consequences were uproarious beyond belief;but no one seemed to care; on the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed heartily,and enjoyed it very much; and the latter, soon beginning to mingle in the sports,got pillaged by the young brigands most ruthlessly. What would I not have given to be one of them!Though I never could have been so rude, no, no!I wouldn't for the wealth of all the world have crushed that braided hair, and torn it down;and for the precious little shoe, I wouldn't have plucked it off, God bless my soul!to save my life. As to measuring her waist in sport, as they did, bold young brood,I couldn't have done it; I should have expected my arm to have grown round it for a punishment,and never come straight again. And yet I should have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips;to have questioned her, that she might have opened them;to have looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never raised a blush;to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of which would be a keepsake beyond price: in short,I should have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence of a child,and yet to have been man enough to know its value.
But now a knocking at the door was heard,and such a rush immediately ensued that she with laughing face and plundered dress was borne towards it the centre of a flushed and boisterous group,just in time to greet the father, who came home attended by a man laden with Christmas toys and presents.Then the shouting and the struggling, and the onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter!The scaling him with chairs for ladders to dive into his pockets,despoil him of brown-paper parcels, hold on tight by his cravat, hug him round his neck,pommel his back, and kick his legs in irrepressible affection!The shouts of wonder and delight with which the development of every package was received!The terrible announcement that the baby had been taken in the act of putting a doll's frying-pan into his mouth,and was more than suspected of having swallowed a fictitious turkey, glued on a wooden platter!The immense relief of finding this a false alarm!The joy, and gratitude, and ecstasy!They are all indescribable alike. It is enough that by degrees the children and their emotions got out of the parlour,and by one stair at a time, up to the top of the house; where they went to bed, and so subsided.
And now Scrooge looked on more attentively than ever, when the master of the house,having his daughter leaning fondly on him, sat down with her and her mother at his own fireside;and when he thought that such another creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise,might have called him father, and been a spring-time in the haggard winter of his life, his sight grew very dim indeed.
"Belle," said the husband, turning to his wife with a smile,"I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon."
"Who was it?"
"Guess!"
"How can I?Tut, don't I know?" she added in the same breath, laughing as he laughed. "Mr. Scrooge."
"Mr. Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as it was not shut up,and he had a candle inside, I could scarcely help seeing him.His partner lies upon the point of death, I hear; and there he sat alone. Quite alone in the world, I do believe."
"Spirit!" said Scrooge in a broken voice, "remove me from this place."
"I told you these were shadows of the things that have been," said the Ghost."That they are what they are, do not blame me!"
"Remove me!" Scrooge exclaimed, "I cannot bear it!"
He turned upon the Ghost, and seeing that it looked upon him with a face,in which in some strange way there were fragments of all the faces it had shown him, wrestled with it.
"Leave me!Take me back. Haunt me no longer!"
In the struggle, if that can be called a struggle in which the Ghost with no visible resistance on its own part was undisturbed by any effort of its adversary,Scrooge observed that its light was burning high and bright;and dimly connecting that with its influence over him, he seized the extinguisher-cap,and by a sudden action pressed it down upon its head.
The Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher covered its whole form;but though Scrooge pressed it down with all his force, he could not hide the light:which streamed from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground.
He was conscious of being exhausted, and overcome by an irresistible drowsiness; and, further,of being in his own bedroom. He gave the cap a parting squeeze, in which his hand relaxed;and had barely time to reel to bed, before he sank into a heavy sleep.
STAVE III: THE SECOND OF THE THREE SPIRITS
AWAKING in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore,and sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together,Scrooge had no occasion to be told that the bell was again upon the stroke of One.He felt that he was restored to consciousness in the right nick of time,for the especial purpose of holding a conference with the second messenger despatched to him through Jacob Marley's intervention.But finding that he turned uncomfortably cold when he began to wonder which of his curtains this new spectre would draw back,he put them every one aside with his own hands; and lying down again,established a sharp look-out all round the bed.For he wished to challenge the Spirit on the moment of its appearance,and did not wish to be taken by surprise, and made nervous.
Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves on being acquainted with a move or two,and being usually equal to the time-of-day,express the wide range of their capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter;between which opposite extremes, no doubt,there lies a tolerably wide and comprehensive range of subjects.Without venturing for Scrooge quite as hardily as this,I don't mind calling on you to believe that he was ready for a good broad field of strange appearances,and that nothing between a baby and rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.
Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by any means prepared for nothing; and,consequently, when the Bell struck One, and no shape appeared,he was taken with a violent fit of trembling. Five minutes, ten minutes,a quarter of an hour went by, yet nothing came. All this time, he lay upon his bed,the very core and centre of a blaze of ruddy light,which streamed upon it when the clock proclaimed the hour; and which, being only light,was more alarming than a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it meant,or would be at; and was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very moment an interesting case of spontaneous combustion,without having the consolation of knowing it. At last, however,he began to think--as you or I would have thought at first;for it is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it,and would unquestionably have done it too--at last, I say,he began to think that the source and secret of this ghostly light might be in the adjoining room,from whence, on further tracing it, it seemed to shine.This idea taking full possession of his mind,he got up softly and shuffled in his slippers to the door.
The moment Scrooge's hand was on the lock, a strange voice called him by his name, and bade him enter. He obeyed.
It was his own room. There was no doubt about that.But it had undergone a surprising transformation.The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove;from every part of which, bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe,and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there;and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney,as that dull petrification of a hearth had never known in Scrooge's time, or Marley's,or for many and many a winter season gone. Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne,were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, sucking-pigs,long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts,cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes,and seething bowls of punch, that made the chamber dim with their delicious steam.In easy state upon this couch, there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to see; who bore a glowing torch,in shape not unlike Plenty's horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on Scrooge, as he came peeping round the door.
"Come in!" exclaimed the Ghost. "Come in!and know me better, man!"
Scrooge entered timidly, and hung his head before this Spirit.He was not the dogged Scrooge he had been; and though the Spirit's eyes were clear and kind, he did not like to meet them.
"I am the Ghost of Christmas Present," said the Spirit."Look upon me!"
Scrooge reverently did so. It was clothed in one simple green robe, or mantle,bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure,that its capacious breast was bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any artifice.Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the garment, were also bare;and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath,set here and there with shining icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free;free as its genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice,its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. Girded round its middle was an antique scabbard;but no sword was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.
"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.