Purely in the interests of maintaining a regular series of
blog postings on weekdays, we’ve put up this little reminder that if you are
reading this, you probably should be out doing something else:
Stave I
Marley’s Ghost
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| The Ghost of Savings Past, Present, and Future. |
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever
about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk,
the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name
was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was
as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge,
what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined,
myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the
trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed
hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore
permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be
otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years.
Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his
sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was
not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of
business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted
bargain.
The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point
I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly
understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If
we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play
began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night,
in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other
middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot — say
Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance — literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.
Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood,
years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was
known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called
Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was
all the same to him.
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| Scrooge and his money. |
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone,
Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old
sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out
generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold
within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his
cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out
shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his
eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about
with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at
Christmas.
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No
warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer
than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less
open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest
rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in
only one respect. They often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did.
Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome
looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?” No beggars
implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no
man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a
place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men’s dogs appeared to know him; and when
they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and
then would wag their tails as though they said, “No eye at all is better than
an evil eye, dark master!”
But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked.
To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to
keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call “nuts” to Scrooge.
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| You-Know-Who |
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.
* * * *
Now . . . aren’t you ashamed of yourself that you read this
far without going out and doing something?