The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge Page 5

  “He was a debtor,” said Mr. Portly slowly. “He owed ten shillings and sixpence and came to the bank for a loan of the sum.”

  “Indeed,” said Mr. Pleasant, the memory swimming to the surface from the murky past. “We could do nothing to help him, of course, but such a small debt must have easily been repaid.”

  “Must it?” asked the Spirit, with a wink at Scrooge.

  “His debt was repaid, to be sure,” said Scrooge. “And the ten and six he borrowed from a moneylender has compounded, as of today, into three hundred and sixteen pounds, eight shillings, and twopence.”

  “Oh, he shall never be able to pay such a debt,” said Mr. Pleasant, who now had a clear picture of the man’s past financial irresponsibility before him.

  “Indeed, it seems unlikely,” said Mr. Portly, peering over the man’s shoulder. “He seems to do nothing but write letters to acquaintances asking for assistance. He’s not likely to keep pace with the interest in that manner.”

  “Some useful occupation is what he should pursue,” said Mr. Pleasant.

  “And what useful occupation would you have him pursue here in debtors’ prison?” asked Scrooge, his voice tinged with impatience. “What useful occupation could he possibly pursue when his interest is compounded at a rate that would make you and Mr. Portly paupers in six months’ time? And to think what a small sum would have saved him once.”

  “Would have saved him?” said Mr. Portly quietly. “Do you mean to say there is no hope whatsoever?”

  “That is not for me to say,” said the Spirit.

  “He was a kind man, as I recall,” said Mr. Pleasant. “A right jolly fellow.”

  “Ten and six,” muttered Scrooge. “’Tis a shame to throw away a life for such a small sum.”

  “I wonder if perhaps—” Mr. Portly began, but his rumination was interrupted by the Spirit, who, without speaking, grabbed each banker by the hand and whisked them away, or so it seemed, on the very air, until the broken man, the locked cell, and the whole of the debtors’ prison melted away below them in the mist which now swirled across the city.

  Then the strange quartet—Messrs. Pleasant and Portly still dressed for dinner, though their ties were loosened, Scrooge in his nightclothes, and the towering Spirit in his glowing green mantle—seemed to drop gently from the sky and settled in a tiny court where they were nearly overcome by the reek of malodourous fumes rising from an accumulation of sewage and refuse that lay heaped in every corner and under every foot.

  “I doubt you’ve visited any of the rookeries of our city,” remarked Scrooge as if he were showing off a row of fine houses on Park Lane. “Welcome.”

  What surrounded them left Messrs. Pleasant and Portly speechless for some time, as Scrooge led the way through the dark neighbourhood: wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper; every room let out to a different family, and in many instances to two or even three—fruit and “sweetstuff” manufacturers in the cellars, barbers and red herring vendors in the front parlours, cobblers in the back, a bird fancier on the first floor, three families on the second, starvation in the attics, Irishmen in the passage, a “musician” in the front kitchen, a charwoman and five hungry children in the back one; filth everywhere—a gutter before the houses and a drain behind—clothes drying, and slops emptying from the windows; girls of fourteen or fifteen with matted hair, walking about barefoot and in white greatcoats, almost their only covering; boys of all ages, in coats of all sizes and no coats at all; men and women, in every variety of scanty and dirty apparel, lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling, fighting, and swearing.

  Scrooge led the strange, unseen party through one of the houses. The rooms were seldom more than eight feet square, the furnishings often consisting of nothing more than the pickings from nearby rubbish heaps. The grime on the walls was so thick it streamed to the floor. In one room, they discovered a mother and six children—the children shortly to be banished to the streets for several hours whilst their mother used the room to earn the money to feed them in the only way she could. Room after room, house after house, court after court, Scrooge led the two bankers until they had all but forgotten their supernatural companion and could think of nothing but filth, squalor, disease, and death—for it was death, more than anything else, that infused these pestilential streets.

  Finally, they could bear it no more. “Do not torture us this way, Ebenezer!” cried Mr. Portly. “There is only so much misery a man can take.”

  Scrooge pointed to a man who lay against the crumbling wall of a nearby house. “Would you say that he has reached that limit?”

  “Surely,” said Mr. Pleasant, “we might find a way to help some of these souls.”

  “So I thought,” said Scrooge. “That is why I wrote a cheque for fifty pounds to the Metropolitan Sanitary Association. They had hoped to pull these tumbling, disease-ridden houses down, to clean the streets and courts, to replace the current buildings with new and clean homes for those unfortunate enough not to be born into banking families.”

  At that moment, Mr. Portly became suddenly aware again of the presence of the Spirit, who now lurked in a shadowy corner of the court in which they stood. It was not the glistening of the icicles encircling the Spirit’s head that drew his attention, nor the thought that the feast with which the ghost had first surrounded himself might do much good in these quarters; rather, it was something protruding from the skirts of the Spirit, something with all the appearance of a clawlike foot, as shrivelled as that of the dying children they had witnessed in the surrounding houses.

  “Is there a child beneath your robes, Spirit?” asked Mr. Portly. “Or do the shadows merely bring some bit of rubbish to life before my tired eyes?”

  “It might be rubbish, for the flesh there is upon it,” was the Spirit’s sorrowful reply. “Look here.”

  From the folds of its robe, the ghost brought two children, wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable—a reflection of all the bankers had seen on their recent tour. They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds.

  “Whence came these children?” asked Mr. Portly. “Spirit, did you find them in some room of this rookery, or are . . . are they yours?”

  “They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. You may be ignorant no more, but you must banish the ignorance of others.”

  “Have these poor children no refuge or resource?” cried Mr. Pleasant. “Can no one show them an ounce of liberality?”

  “Liberality is not the business of a bank,” said the Spirit, turning on him with his own words. And as the banker opened his mouth to reply . . .

  The bell struck three.

  The three men now found themselves back where their tour had begun, that being the drawing room in the house of Messrs. Pleasant and Portly. The two residents of that place once again sat in their chairs by the fireplace and a lamp burned on the table between them. Opposite, on a cushioned divan, sat Scrooge.

  “I have been thinking,” said Mr. Pleasant, as if the conversation was a mere continuation of their earlier discussion and no supernatural beings had disturbed their evening. “The bank has other customers besides Mr. Scrooge.”

  “My thoughts exactly,” said Mr. Portly. “Customers who might be more . . . shall we say more economically suited to the sort of largesse for which Mr. Scrooge makes so compelling a case.”

  The two bankers took no notice of Scrooge, and the old man almost wondered if he had become a ghost himself
at some point during his nocturnal travels. If so, he thought, he hoped the afterlife would provide more stimulating adventures than eavesdropping on the conversations of financiers. He slid down low in the divan, rested his head against a cushion, and felt himself drifting away to the soothing tones of Messrs. Pleasant and Portly’s excited chatter.

  “If we were to approach a few clients . . .”

  “A few selected clients . . .”

  “A few specially selected clients . . .”

  “Clients of means . . .”

  “Clients of substantial means . . .”

  “I know just the lady. . . .”

  “I know just the gentleman. . . .”

  STAVE IV

  The Last of the Three Spirits

  When Scrooge awoke, he beheld neither the sleeping forms of Messrs. Pleasant and Portly nor the familiar surroundings of his own room, but only, drifting towards him through the stagnant air of a dimly lit street, a frighteningly familiar figure. When he had struck his bargain with Jacob Marley what seemed like days ago, Scrooge had known this moment would come, but he had tried, in the intervening hours, to push all thought of the third and final spirit from his mind, for facing that ghost was a horror he was loath to repeat.

  Scrooge lowered himself onto one knee and bent his head down so that he saw only the black hem of the cloak that enveloped the ghost. “Greetings, Spirit,” he whispered. “Our time is short, and I know you to be a ghost of few words, so let us undertake with haste the task that brings you here.”

  To this speech the Spirit made no response, but merely floated above Scrooge and sniffed the night air from somewhere deep within its mantle, as if it had not smelled the air of the outdoors for many a month and even the dank fumes of a hot summer night were refreshment to it.

  Though Scrooge had followed this Spirit many years ago, and suffered no permanent injury for its company, his legs still trembled as he climbed to his feet, and his breath came stuttering to his lips as he muttered, “Lead on, Spirit. I have travelled far and laboured hard this night, and I would rest yet before morning.”

  The Spirit raised a spectral hand from its cloak and pointed into the receding darkness of the street in which they stood. Taking this to mean that he should lead the way, Scrooge stepped past the ghost and felt a chill from the crown of his head to the tips of his toes. The heat of the night did little to comfort the old man, who wobbled down the street shivering, knowing full well the Spirit drifted just behind him.

  Though he walked at a pace that might be expected from a man of his age passing through the streets in his nightclothes, the city seemed to fold in upon Scrooge with increasing rapidity, and it was no more than five minutes later that he found himself in a dark street of Camden Town, as shabby, dingy, damp, and mean a neighbourhood as one would desire to see. Before him was a familiar door and in another moment he found himself, and the awful Spirit, inside the door, observing the scene before the grate.

  In a chair by the hearth sat a man who might have been fifty or seventy, for all the dim light showed of his features. As it happened, Scrooge knew the man’s age to the day, for he had marked Bob Cratchit’s birthday annually for the past twenty years. Bob sat with his back to his visitors, reading the latest monthly installment of some popular novel. Scrooge was not timid about disturbing his partner’s peace.

  “How many times have I told you, Cratchit, to move from this four-room hovel to some abode in a cleaner quarter of the city?”

  “Mr. Scrooge!” cried Cratchit, dropping his reading on the floor and jumping to his feet with a start. “I did not hear you come in. Is not the hour a bit late for you to be about in your nightclothes?”

  Cratchit had, in fact, long suspected that Scrooge lived on the edge of sanity, and now it seemed that his partner had plunged into the abyss and would be making the journey to Bedlam at long last. But Scrooge was as sane as you or I and merely continued to reprimand his former clerk.

  “And haven’t I told you that there’s no need to call me Mr. Scrooge, nor has there been any reason since you became my partner twenty years ago? I have a Christian name, and though it may not be a thing of beauty, I daresay if it was good enough for the vicar who doused me in holy water, it is good enough for Bob Cratchit.”

  “Ebenezer,” said Cratchit, sliding sideways across the wall until he reached the poker and grasping that tool in case the need for a weapon arose, “I think it would be best if we took you home to get some sleep.”

  “But then you always were a creature of habit,” said Scrooge, ignoring his partner’s suggestion. “You never could call me anything but Mr. Scrooge, you never could live anywhere but here, and you never did much like taking days off to visit your family. Except Christmas Day, of course.”

  “Really, Mr. Scrooge,” said Cratchit, “I think . . .” But what Cratchit thought was forever lost, for at that moment he saw the dark figure lurking by the doorway, its skeletal hand now reaching out towards him in a slow, beckoning motion.

  “We need to take a journey,” said Scrooge. “Come.” Cratchit let the poker clatter to the floor and came.

  Through the streets of Camden Town and back towards the city the unseen trio made their way in silence. Though Scrooge knew they were travelling towards Christmas yet to come, he could not, from the weather, have guessed the time of year, for the air felt both cold and hot. What vapours came from the Spirit and what from the weather, he knew not. The night and the city seemed endless, and Scrooge had begun to despair that the Spirit would fulfill his mission, when at last they slipped the bonds of darkness and stood in a brightly lit nursery, where a young woman was serving tea cakes to three small children. There was a Christmas tree in the corner, decorated with gleaming ornaments, and beneath it a wooden locomotive brightly painted in green and gold.

  “What did Grandmother mean,” said the youngest child, a little girl no more than four, “when she said she would take us to the seaside next summer?”

  The eldest child looked, to Scrooge, to be a boy of about ten, and his two younger sisters looked to him with a gleam of admiration as he answered this question.

  “That we shall have a glorious time together with her. You shall love the seaside,” he said. “There will be bathing machines and wooden spades, and ever so much sand to dig in.”

  “But how do you know?” asked the older of the girls.

  “Grandmother took me one summer,” said the boy. “We stayed at a lodging house near the bandstand, and at night we could hear the music and the sound of the waves on the shingle through the open window.”

  “Goodness!” exclaimed Cratchit, with a flash of recognition. “I think it must be young Tim, my grandson. But how he’s grown. He can’t have gotten so tall just since Christmas.”

  “These are the shadows of things yet to come,” said Scrooge. “Our guide has a special talent for revealing such things,” he added, giving a nod in the direction of the ghost, who towered behind them.

  “Was Grandfather there?” asked the girl who had spoken before.

  “Goodness, no,” laughed Tim. “Christmas morning—that’s all Grandfather is good for. You shan’t catch him making merry on the beach when there’s work to be done in that office of his.”

  “What does Grandfather do in his office, anyway?” asked the girl.

  “Something to do with money and numbers,” said Tim sagely. “You’re too young to understand.”

  “It sounds dreadfully dull,” said his sister. “When I’m grown I shall play at the seaside with my grandchildren instead of working in a dingy old office.”

  “So shall I,” said Tim forcefully.

  “Which one is Grandfather?” asked the younger girl, speaking for the first time since finishing her cake.

  “The one who brings the lovely presents on Christmas and laughs at the table with the grown-ups,” said Tim.

  “I shoul
d prefer a playmate all the year round to the loveliest present at Christmas,” said the young girl.

  “That’s why we have two grandfathers,” laughed Tim. “One to bring presents and one to be our friend!”

  “But the young Mrs. Cratchit’s father doesn’t bring lovely presents,” protested Cratchit.

  “Of course he doesn’t,” said Scrooge. “You do.”

  “Do you mean to say,” began Cratchit, but he stopped in midsentence as he realised the full import of the conversation between his grandson and his future granddaughters.

  A chill seemed to overtake the room, and the figures of the children became like gauze, until they dissolved away altogether and the two men found themselves again on a dim street with the silent Spirit. Neither Scrooge nor Cratchit recognised their surroundings as any part of London, but they followed the ghost through a tall stone arch into a courtyard from which a dozen or so doors led into the surrounding buildings.

  Through one of these doors the trio somehow passed, and they soon found themselves in a tiny room where a single boy might conduct his studies. In this space, with its wooden desk, stool, and reading chair and by the light of a single lamp, six young men sprawled, lounged, lay, sat, and leaned. Somehow, though neither of the men could explain how afterwards, Scrooge, Cratchit, and the deathly Spirit found space to stand amongst the boys.

  Outside, the snow was piled high and fell so thickly that the building opposite was barely visible. The wind rattled the windowpanes, but a fire leapt merrily in the grate and its cheeriness seemed to have lured the boys to this particular study.

  “The worst thing about being trapped here for Christmas by the snow,” said a boy on whose knee an open (and ignored) book on Euclid perched precariously, “is that I will miss seeing my grandfather. He’s a right jolly bloke and fancies himself a sort of Father Christmas. He came to live at the country house when I was six, and he’s a great one for riding. Taught me everything I know about horses.”