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 overflowings 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 blood-thirsty
in the streets, stirred up tomorrow’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
gentleman!
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
tomorrow, I suppose?’ said Scrooge.
‘If quite convenient,
sir.’
‘It’s not convenient,’
said Scrooge, ‘and it’s not fair. If I was to stop 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 meill 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 blind-man’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 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 have 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.