A Christmas Carol

Marley was dead, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the church, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner.

1 Scrooge signed it. And Scrooge’s name was good for anything he chose to put his hand to.

Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were business partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his only administrator, his only friend, his only mourner.

Scrooge never painted out old Marley’s name, however. There it yet was, years afterwards, above the warehouse door — Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called him Scrooge, and sometimes they called him Marley. He answered to both names. It was all the same to him.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, that Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner! External heat and cold had little influence on him. No warmth could warm him, and no cold could cool him. No wind that blew was more bitter than he. Foul weather didn’t know what to do with him. The heaviest rain and snow and hail and sleet could brag of the advantage over him in only one respect — they often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with friendly looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?” No beggars asked Scrooge for a few coins; no children asked him what time it was; no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place. But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked.

city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already.

The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open so that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, Bob Cratchit, who, in a sad little room, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk’s fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one piece of coal. But the clerk couldn’t add to it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in his own room; and if the clerk came in with the shovel, he feared Scrooge would simply dismiss him on the spot. That’s why the clerk put on his white scarf, and tried to warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

“A merry Christmas, uncle!” It was the cheerful voice of Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, who came into the office so quickly that this was the first hint Scrooge had of his approach.

“Bah!” said Scrooge; “humbug!”

“Christmas a humbug, uncle! You don’t mean that, I am sure!”

“I do. Forget merry Christmas! What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, and not an hour richer? If I had my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart!”

“Uncle!”

“Nephew, keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”