The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge Read Free Page A

the window in the sitting room. Scrooge called it his “German toy,” but to those who glimpsed it from the street below it was merely a Christmas tree. Even in the pale evening light it sparkled andglittered with bright objects. There were miniature French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, and various other articles of domestic furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at Wolverhampton) perched amongst the boughs; there were jolly broad-faced little men, much more agreeable in appearance than many real men—and no wonder, for their heads came off and showed them to be full of sugarplums; there were fiddles and drums; there were tambourines, books, workboxes, paint boxes, and sweetmeat boxes; there was real fruit, made artificially dazzling with gold leaf; there were imitation apples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises; in short, as a child visitor to Scrooge’s rooms once delightedly whispered to her bosom friend, “There is everything, and more.”
    In what most of London had come to think of as his former life (that is, the time before the appearance of four ghosts one Christmas Eve transformed his general outlook), Scrooge had derived a substantial augmentation to his income by letting out the other rooms in the building as offices. As then, those rooms were now filled in the daytime with clerks and visited by gentlemen who resembled, in clothing and carriage, the Messrs. Pleasant and Portly; however, Scrooge’s income from all this bustling activity could now be expressed in a single syllable: nil. The rooms were now let, on terms that far exceeded liberal, to various charitable societies which attempted, intheir various ways, to fulfill the various needs of London’s lowermost classes.
    By the time Scrooge returned to the house, the windows were all dark and even the yard was deep in shadow, for the sun had finally been coaxed out of the sky into its briefest retirement of the year. Now, it is a fact that there was nothing at all particular about the knocker on the door, except that, as aforementioned, it was very large. Nonetheless, it was Scrooge’s habit, having his key in the lock, to look deep into the shadows that rippled across the surface of the brass. A passing observer might have attributed this behaviour to the acknowledged fact that Scrooge had as much of what is called “fancy” about him as any man in London—including the wittiest actor in the West End and the happiest lunatic in Bedlam. But to Scrooge, the behaviour of the knocker had become an omen, a harbinger of what might await him in his rooms above. On this night, as on many previous nights in the past twenty years, Scrooge saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change, not a knocker, but Marley’s face.
    Yes, Jacob Marley, once partner in Scrooge’s countinghouse but now dead one score and seven years, was in the habit of making periodic appearances in Scrooge’s knocker. Tonight his countenance glowed lurid in the evening haze, as if thesun had not undertaken its brief nocturnal sojourn but still reflected off the polished brass. To anyone else, it would have seemed horrible, but in Scrooge, who knew what the ghostly spectacles and curiously stirred hair portended, Marley’s appearance engendered not fear but delight. Scrooge rubbed the knocker, which was once again merely a knocker, with one hand as he turned the key with the other. Chuckling, he entered the dim hall and mounted the stairs, trimming his candle as he went.
    Even at that time of year, when the yard without was never truly dark, half a dozen gas lamps out of the street wouldn’t have lighted the entry too well, so you may suppose it was pretty dark even with Scrooge’s candle.
    Up Scrooge bounced, not caring a button for that: Darkness was cheap, and a penny saved in tolerating darkness for himself might subsequently be spent providing light for someone else. As soon as he