[Literature] Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol #6/41

There were Cains and
Abels; Pharaoh’s 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 storey 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 pig-tail, usual waistcoat, tights, and boots; the tassels on the latter
bristling, like his pig-tail, 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 wereyou
then?’ said Scrooge, raising his voice. ‘You’re particular —
for a shade.’ He was going to say ‘toa 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.