e-angielski

stave 1

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.

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 dogdays; 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.

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
tomorrow.’

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 greetings 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 gentlemen, referring to his list. ‘Have I the pleasure of
addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr. Marley?’

‘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 returned 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 overflowing 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 mighty 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 to–morrow’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

‘God bless you, merry gentlemen! May nothing you
dismay!’

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.

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 to–morrow, I
suppose?’ said Scrooge.

‘If quite convenient, sir.’

‘It’s not convenient,’ said Scrooge,
‘and it’s not fair. If I was to stop you
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 a
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 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 years’ 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 on 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, bedroom, 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 had 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–guards, 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 nightcap; 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,
Pharaohs’ 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 indoors, 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
fellowmen, 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 opportunity misused! Yet such was
I! Oh! such was I!’

‘But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,’
faltered 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 tomorrow,
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.