The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge Page 3

  A moment later, Marley stepped back and looked his friend in the eyes. “What do you need from me?” he asked.

  “First,” said Scrooge, without the slightest hesitation, “I shall require three spirits.”

  STAVE II

  The First of the Three Spirits

  Many a person in Scrooge’s excited state (and I daresay you are one of them) would have shunned sleep, knowing as he did that his night would be haunted by not one but three spectres beyond that which had already paid him a visit. Not so for Scrooge, though. He climbed into bed, pulled the curtains shut around him, and was soon as sound asleep as you or I would be on a cold winter’s night when a fire burned in the grate, the covers were piled high atop us, and we had nothing more to worry our minds than to wonder if the snow would stop falling by daybreak.

  Scrooge awoke in blackness so complete that he knew it must be near the hour of the first ghost’s coming—for only at such an hour, deep in the night, would total darkness reign in midsummer. The air sat stiller than still around him and no sounds drifted up from the street to his open window. He was endeavouring to pierce the gloom with his sparkling eyes (which somehow continued to glitter despite the dearth of light) when the chimes of a neighbouring church struck the four quarters. Holding his breath with excitement, he listened for the hour. One. No more. The hour had come!

  Before Scrooge could leap from his bed to greet the visitor he knew must even then be arriving in his rooms, the curtains of his bed, at his feet, were drawn aside by a hand. In an instant Scrooge was sitting at the foot of the bed, his warm feet dangling above the floor, his face inches from the smooth and youthful visage of his unearthly visitor. How well he remembered that supernatural figure that hovered before him—though they had met only once, a score of years ago. The flowing hair of ancient white so incongruous with the tender bloom of rose on the unsullied cheeks, the muscular arms and legs bare to the warm air, the tunic of purest white, the sprig of holly, and above all the clear winter light that sprung from his head. Scrooge felt as if he were meeting an old friend, and he could not have been more delighted if the dearest companion of his youth had materialised in his rooms.

  “Welcome, gentle Spirit!” cried Scrooge. “I thank you for coming to my aid on a night when you should, by all rights, be at rest.”

  The Ghost of Christmas Past—for that, of course, is who stood before Mr. Scrooge—tossed back his head, shook his white locks, and let forth a long, musical sigh. “It is indeed many a year since I have ventured abroad in this sultry season, but I carry my winter with me.” Scrooge observed that the spirit’s sigh had frosted the windows and raised gooseflesh on his own arms. “What business brings me here?”

  “The welfare of my dear friend Jacob Marley, and of a thousand others who suffer in this city tonight.”

  The ghost held out his hand. “I once guided you on a journey,” he said, “but now you have summoned me and shall be my guide. Whither would you?”

  Scrooge laid his hand on that of the ghost and clasped him gently. “Before we journey to that past which is your domain, we must collect another passenger,” he said. But before he had uttered the name of that soul, who lay asleep and unsuspecting a few miles away, he and the ghost had passed through the wall. Scrooge was afforded no more than a glimpse of the lights of London before he found himself standing, with his spectral companion, at the foot of a bed not unlike his own, though the room in which it stood was cluttered with papers that seemed to cascade from every surface (of which there were many). Wild-eyed and afraid for his life, his hair jutting out from his head at unlikely angles, sat Scrooge’s nephew, bolt upright and clinging to the bedsheet, which he had pulled nearly over his head in fright.

  “Merry Christmas, nephew!” bellowed Scrooge.

  “U-u-u-uncle?” stuttered the disbelieving nephew.

  “I’d like you to meet my nephew, Freddie,” said Scrooge, as casually as if he were introducing two acquaintances on a street corner. “Freddie, this is a dear friend of mine who once helped save my life and tonight will help save yours. May I present the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

  If possible, Freddie’s eyes opened even wider. From sheer force of habit, he managed to whisper, “Very pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. . . .”

  “You may call me Spirit,” said the ghost jovially.

  “And what is your business here, Spirit?” asked Freddie, with a bureaucratic air that belied his continued unease.

  “As I said, nephew, we come for your welfare.”

  The nephew, now fully awake and of the belief that he might dispose of these unwelcome visitors in the same manner that he disposed of those members of the public who deigned to wander into his office in Whitehall, noted that a night of unbroken rest would have been more conducive to that end.

  “Take heed!” cried the Spirit, rattling all authority out of poor Freddie, who now, if he had been wearing boots, would have been shaking in them.

  “Rise and walk with us,” said Scrooge. “You must see the past ere we plot your future.” With this he laid one hand on his nephew and the other on the Spirit, and in a twinkling (though Freddie might have been more likely to describe it as a trembling) the trio found themselves in a cold stone room. The air was dank and stale, the only light a pale and hazy aura that seeped through an iron-barred window high overhead. The room was unfurnished (it was, in fact, so small it would have admitted little more than a single kitchen stool) and Freddie at first thought it empty. A low groan from behind him he took to be the voice of the ghost, until that spectre removed his cap and the room was flooded with the white light that flowed from his pate.

  Freddie turned on his feet to take in the entire room, which he now saw to be no more than six feet square. When he saw the source of the groan he stopped in horror, his breath catching in his throat. Against his better judgment, he stared transfixed at the figure before him. The woman lay slumped against the rough stone wall, her hands and feet fastened to those same stones with chains as heavy as those that encumbered the ghost of Jacob Marley—a spirit which Freddie, prior to that night, had dismissed as his uncle’s fancy. The woman’s clothes were so ragged as to be nearly superfluous and her hair was matted far worse than the fur of the stray dogs on London’s streets.

  “What godforsaken prison is this?” choked Freddie.

  “Not a prison,” said the ghost, to whom Freddie now paid rapt attention. “An asylum. St. Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics. This creature came here in hopes of a cure for her madness.”

  “This cannot be,” gasped Freddie. “Such inhumanity is surely a thing of the past.”

  “So it is,” said the ghost. “Perhaps you forget who I am. But this is a past you must see.”

  “She was a governess,” said Scrooge, “working for a respectable family for seven years before she became ill. Now she has been chained to that wall for as many years, with no hope of salvation.”

  The woman groaned again, a quiet and resigned sort of groan that seeped out of her like the last of the air out of a squeeze-box. She took no notice of either her visitors or the light they brought to her cell. Freddie reached out to touch her filthy shoulder but felt nothing but cold air.

  “She is but the shadow of what has been,” said the ghost. “She has no consciousness of us.”

  “What day is this?” asked Freddie, his eyes still on the wretched creature at his feet.

  “Christmas Day,” answered the ghost. “A Christmas before you were brought into this world, though not before your uncle heard the first chorus of ‘Merry Christmas’ strike his ears.”

  “But how can doctors treat a poor woman like this?” asked Freddie.

  “Coercion for the outward man, and rabid physicking for the inward man, were then the specifics for lunacy,” replied the ghost. “Chains, straw, filthy solitude, darkness, and starvation; spinning in whirligigs, corporal punishment, gagging, cont
inued intoxication; nothing was too wildly extravagant, nothing too monstrously cruel to be prescribed by mad-doctors.”

  “And what is to happen to this soul?” asked Freddie, tears gathering in his eyes as he felt unfamiliar emotions coursing through him.

  But the ghost only replied, “Remember this Christmas and what you saw here.”

  At this Freddie finally tore his eyes away from the woman and turned on his uncle. “Why did you bring me here, Uncle Ebenezer?” he cried, tears of despair and anger now streaming down his face. “Why do you show me this sight and tell me there is nothing I can do?”

  “There is much you can do,” replied Scrooge calmly, exchanging a knowing smile with the ghost. “But it is time we moved on.”

  As the room dissolved around them, and the figure of the poor woman faded into the shadow that it was, and then into nothingness, Freddie heard an upwelling of cries, as if a thousand other inmates of that ghastly place let out their miseries at once. As the sound seemed just about to overwhelm them, it suddenly stopped, and Freddie found himself standing in a narrow street that curved downhill to the river, with some stairs at the end, where pedestrians might become passengers of the craft that plied the waters of the Thames. At the top of those stairs, where Freddie and his companions now found themselves, was a crazy old house with a wharf of its own, which must have abutted on the water when the tide was in, but now abutted only mud. The sun hung low in the sky and there was a winter chill in the air.

  “I know this place,” said Scrooge excitedly, pointing to the sign that hung upon the waterside warehouse. MURDSTONE AND GRINBY’S, it proclaimed. Though Freddie was still adjusting to the fact that it was no longer either nighttime or summer and that he was no longer in either St. Luke’s or his own lodgings, Scrooge grinned with delight at his realisation: Not only did the grim and grimy warehouse inhabit the end of a street in Blackfriars; it also inhabited the pages of the novel that currently rested atop Scrooge’s bedside table a few miles and some decades hence.

  The travellers ventured inside the warehouse, inured as they were to the horrors of what they would see by the fact that they visited only shadows of what had been. Within they discovered panelled rooms, discoloured with the dirt and smoke of a hundred years. The floors and staircases were decaying and from the cellars they could hear the squeaking and scuffling of old grey rats. The dirt and rottenness of the place was worse than Freddie had imagined even from its dour exterior.

  A large room on the ground floor of the warehouse rang with stern voices, clanking of machinery, splashing of water, and a score of other noises, making conversation amongst the visitors impossible, but the Spirit led Scrooge and Freddie to a dim and quieter corner, where an especially noxious odour hung in the air. Bent over a small table was a gaunt boy who could not have been more than twelve. His face was drawn and without expression, and his vacant eyes seemed to focus on something far beyond the work of his hands. His clothes were worn and ragged and his face and hands so dirty as to make his racial origins a matter of some uncertainty. The acrid smell in his corner of the warehouse rose from a pot of glue, into which he repeatedly dipped a brush. With this smoking concoction inches from his nose, he brushed the back of a paper label, which he then transferred to an empty bottle. This process he repeated some dozens of times in the few moments that Scrooge and Freddie observed him. His hands were cracked and burned from the glue and his eyes red from the fumes. As he placed each freshly labelled bottle to the side he let out a rattling cough.

  “His father is in debtors’ prison at the Marshalsea,” said the Spirit. “Strange that if a man has twenty pounds a year for his income, and spends nineteen pounds nineteen shillings and sixpence, he is happy, but if he spends twenty pounds one he is miserable, as are his children.”

  “A talented boy he was,” added Scrooge. “Such promise.”

  Without pausing to ask how Scrooge knew the young lad, Freddie asked, “How long must he work like this?”

  “Sixteen hours a day,” replied the Spirit, “with a half hour for tea.” Though Freddie had meant to ask for how many days or weeks or, God forbid, months longer the boy would be employed in this dreadful work, he reeled at the thought that for even a single day a child should be forced to work such hours in such conditions.

  “And today is . . .” said Freddie.

  “Today is Christmas Day,” said the Spirit.

  “But something must be done!” cried Freddie, anger boiling inside him. “Surely such a child should be in school. And no one should work like this on Christmas Day. Are there no laws, no regulations?”

  “Surely,” said the Spirit, “there are such laws. But I am the Ghost of Christmas Past, and the rules that provide Greek and Latin for a child instead of endless hours of drudgery are quite recent.” It could be argued that Greek and Latin were another form of drudgery, Scrooge reflected, but he couldn’t deny they were a substantially more humane form.

  “It’s a travesty,” said Freddie. “If I had been alive to see such things, I should have marched straight to Parliament and not rested until something was done.”

  “Would you?” asked Scrooge, smiling, for he could almost hear the chains falling from Marley.

  “Wait a moment,” said Freddie, paying no heed to his uncle but rounding on the ghost, his anger welling up red in his face. “That woman you showed me at the asylum—should not the Lunacy Commission have done something for her? We should file a report. Such abuses are not allowed to . . .” His voice trailed off as the ghost drifted before him through the wall of the factory. In the next moment, the three figures hovered over the murky waters of the Thames.

  “I suppose at the time there was no Lunacy Commission,” mumbled Freddie, oblivious to his seemingly precarious position in midair.

  “Not then,” said the ghost. “But problems can be addressed. Shall we pay her another visit?” In an instant the three figures found themselves again within the walls of the asylum.

  “Is it still Christmas past?” asked Freddie, his voice echoing in the stony silence.

  “Quite recent past,” said the ghost. “A mere five Christmases ago.”

  They stood in a long, low gallery with a few windows on one side and a great many doors leading to sleeping cells on the other. Several women were seated on benches around a caged fireplace, all silent, except one. Though there was nothing in her hands, she sewed a mad sort of seam and scolded some imaginary person. Except the scolding woman, every patient in the room either silently looked at the fire or silently looked at the ground—or rather through the ground, and at heaven knows what beyond. Freddie sensed no happiness, but neither did he sense the unjustified misery of the woman he had seen on his previous visit.

  It was a relief to come to a workroom, with coloured prints over the mantel shelf and china shepherdesses upon it, furnished also with tables, a carpet, stuffed chairs, and an open fire. There was a great difference between the demeanour of the occupants of this apartment and that of the inmates of the other room. They were neither so listless nor so sad. Although they did not speak much, they worked with earnestness and diligence, most at some sort of needlework. After a few moments, Scrooge hurried off in the direction of music, which had begun playing in the distance. Freddie followed close on his heels, with the ghost drifting languidly behind.

  In another gallery a ball had begun. Freddie hunted for the figure of the young woman. Amongst the dancers, there were the patients usually to be found in all such asylums. There was the brisk, vain, pippin-faced little old lady, in a fantastic cap, proud of her foot and ankle; there was the old-young woman, with dishevelled long light hair, spare figure, and weird gentility; there was the vacantly laughing girl, requiring now and then a warning finger to admonish her; there was the quiet young woman, almost well, and soon going out. The dancers were not all patients. Amongst them, and dancing with right goodwill, were attendants, male and female—pleasa
nt-looking men, not at all realising the conventional idea of “keepers,” and pretty women, gracefully though not at all inappropriately dressed, and with looks and smiles as sparkling as one might hope to see in any dance in any place.

  The moment the dance was over, away the porter ran, not in the least out of breath, to help light up the tree. Presently it stood in the centre of its room, growing out of the floor, a blaze of light and glitter, blossoming in that place for the first time in a hundred years. Shining beside it, shining above them all, and shining everywhere, the resident officer’s wife. Freddie could tell in an instant, as she helped the inmates to pass round the tree and admire, that heaven had inspired her clear head and strong heart to have no Christmas wish beyond this place, but to look upon it as her home, and on its inmates as her afflicted children.

  “I think you’ll agree, there’s been an improvement,” said the ghost.

  “One only needed to pass some proper laws,” said Freddie indignantly, as if this were the simplest thing in the world.

  “Yes,” said Scrooge, “such things can do good at times.”

  “But where is the young woman?” asked Freddie. “You promised I should see what became of her.”

  “Not a young woman,” said the ghost quietly. “Youth slips away rapidly in such a place under the best of circumstances, and it is two score years since our last visit.” The ghost nodded towards the tree, where the sparkling face of the resident officer’s wife was greeting the last of the inmates. It was the scolding woman who had been sewing a purposeless seam. She still scolded her unseen companion, and looked through the tree as if it were not there, but the hostess nonetheless ushered her round the tree, pointing out its delights. When the pair reemerged from behind the tree, Freddie saw a hint of contentment in the eyes of the old woman.