CRATCHIT’S CAROL: Part Two

VERSE THE SECOND: CHRISTMAS UN-MERRIED.

Author’s note: The story which follows shall be released thusly:

Part 1: VERSE THE FIRST: MY DEAR UNCLE SCROOGE. November 30

Part 2: VERSE THE SECOND: CHRISTMAS UN-MERRIED. December 6

Part 3: VERSE THE THIRD: SPIRITS! Memory’s Ghost. December 12

Part 4: SPIRITS! Continued: A Ghost Enfleshed. December 19

Part 5: SPIRITS! Continued: The Lady. December 22

Part 6: VERSES THUS ENDED, WE PROCEED TO THE CHORUS: December 24

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The Spirit was dead.

It did not die right away, and the following Christmas I did my very best to remember my dear uncle in all his joyfulness at Christmastide, for he always knew how to keep Christmas well. I knew, however, that the Spirit was dying within me. It was as if I were suffering some malady which I could not name, one which I could not cure. I knew it only by its effects: a deep and lingering sadness. I returned to Field Lane determined to do my work as Uncle Scrooge would have wished me to: with a joyful spirit and in gratitude for the vocation my second father had helped me to find.

For a time, this was enough, but I believe it was one day in September when I knew that there had been some alteration from which there was now no returning. I was walking from the home I had inherited from Scrooge, and I realised I had not twirled my cane when I stepped out the door. Such a small and silly thing, but I knew it held significance. I remembered that, quite often, while Scrooge was still around, I had taken a deep breath of the morning air before I began my daily walk to the school, twirled my cane, and set out on my daily journey. I could not that morning remember when I had last done so. I remembered the joy, the gladsome anticipation I’d had as I had taken that walk to the place which was not just my place of employment, but of mission and meaning. Certainly not every morning was filled with this joy, but more than not. Now I looked down at that cane, and I was reminded that my cane was no gentleman’s accessory, but an invalid’s necessity.

To be sure, the days of cloud and grey were no more plenteous at that season than ever they had been in London, but they seemed more oppressive, heavier, like a cold blanket. Whatever life had been left in the Spirit that early December had been pressed out of it by Christmastide. When my brother Peter came knocking at my door that Christmas Eve, I told him I was ill and sent my regrets: I would not be joining my family in their merrymaking.

A second Christmas passed without Uncle Scrooge, and still I remained at the school, yet convinced that I was doing some good there. Had I been honest, however, I would have admitted to myself that I lingered in the employ of Field Lane out of a kind of ennui of the soul; I stayed on because I simply lacked the desire to leave.

Meanwhile, the pupils grew more and more distant from my heart. I would not have admitted this distance, and certainly I had not become a heartless beast, but I know now it was true. My heart simply hadn’t the strength to beat with the compassion it had once known.

It had now been nearly three years to the day since Uncle Scrooge’s passing, and not only was that Christmas Spirit dead and gone, but it seemed at the present that there was another, darker spirit supplanting its withered husk. Almost all joy was gone from this profession which had previously provided such purpose. I limped along the streets toward the school, my cane sounding out to my ears like a leper’s bells announcing the approach of an untouchable. Indeed, I believe this is what I had become: a man unable to feel. The tendrils of darkness were about my heart, and somehow I felt comfort in its coldness.

It was two days before Christmas, and the classroom was a cacophony of screams. The sounds pierced my eardrums like spikes, and I felt an ache forming in my temples, something which was becoming familiar as of late.

“Children!” I shouted, “Your attention please!”

More screaming.

I rapped my ruler on the blackboard. “Your attention please this instant!” I shouted again, to no effect.

My ruler came down on my desk with a thwack, surprising even myself with its force, splitting itself in two somewhere around the seven-inch mark.

“Shut! Up! NOW!!”

There was a stunned silence. In thirteen years of teaching at Field Lane, I don’t believe I had ever used such words, let alone combined with such a violent action.

That was when the boot hit me directly in the face.

You see, this fracas had begun because of a boy named Albert. He was by no means the instigator, but rather was the heated topic of discussion. Albert, in fact, was the only child in the roomful of twenty-two children who was not participating in the row. He sat red-faced in his desk, his head buried in his hands, waiting for the nightmare to end.

The boot, thrown by a girl named Cordelia Vecks, had been intended along with its mate as a kind of military volley upon Liza. Liza, according to Miss Vecks, had kissed the aforementioned Albert. Albert, according to Cordelia, had been Cordelia’s sweetheart going on ten full days, and hence romantic engagement with Liza was beyond all propriety. By Liza’s account, however, Albert had ended his romantic engagement with Cordelia a full day and a half since and was now, therefore, “free to be courted by anuvver.” Miss Vecks, uninformed by Albert of his decision to disengage with her, had a wholly different understanding of the situation. The melee ensued. What could Cordelia do to end the dispute except tear off her boots and fling them at her rival? (No one, of course, had considered consulting poor Albert on the matter.)

A small trickle of blood emerged from my left nostril.

“Cordelia!” I said through clenched teeth, “Please… sit… down,”

I reached for the kerchief in my pocket and applied it to my injury. Cordelia, her stocking feet revealing her big toes, sat down.

“Now,” I continued, a tremble in my voice, “may we please continue with our lesson? We were discussing the story of Jonah and the Great Fish….”

Never was my patience with such antics so slight. It had been years since I could look forward to sharing the story with Uncle Scrooge at the end of the day, having a good laugh over the whole matter, and a good cry over its surrounding sadness.

Cordelia, the thrower of the boot, was being raised by her eldest sister, Frances, aged fourteen. Their mother was not dead, as far as they knew; she had simply left. Their father had not seen them since Cordelia’s fourth birthday. There had been a time when knowing Cordelia’s story would have tempered my frustration or even nullified it altogether, but that time had long passed. The emptiness was corrupting the empathy I had once felt and turning it into a quiet despair.

Though not every child was as precocious as Cordelia, each child had a story every bit as woeful. Ambrose Swidger, aged ten, lived with his mother and four cousins and lately worked as a chimney sweep. Small for his age, as I had been, he was the perfect size for the work of a “climbing boy”, as they were called, regardless of its dangers. His writing papers were often smudged with coal from his fingers or shirtsleeves. If the antics of a Cordelia tested my ire, I could always look to the attentive face of Ambrose to restore my heart to some imitation of joy. I looked at him now, seated in the front row, and I was pleased to notice that he was shooting a perturbed glance at the young women who dared interrupt Jonah’s exciting story. He returned his intense gaze to his teacher.

“Do go on,” he pleaded.

I took a deep breath, dabbed my still-bloodied nose with my handkerchief, and obliged my favourite student.

“And after three days in the darkness of the belly of the beastly fish, what do you think happened?” I asked.

Eyes wide, Ambrose raised his hand. “Did the fish…um… er… drop him out the back way?”

The class erupted in laughter, though it took Ambrose a moment to realise why his astute supposition was met with such hilarity. I continued the story as if only for Ambrose.

“No, the fish did not perform his necessary with Jonah,” I said. “But it had an awful stomachache, and on the third day, he reeled and roiled around in the water until…. BLEEEAACK! He vomited poor Jonah onto the shore!”

Ambrose was truly delighted with the disgusting thought.

“And so Jonah, covered in fish bile, at last obeyed God and began his long walk to the town of Nineveh.”

For the rest of the school day, as we moved from Scripture class to writing, Ambrose buoyed my flagging spirits. He adored coming to school, and he practised his letters with the dedication and precision of an artist. I believe Ambrose loved the ragged school because he felt safe there, and he loved feeling loved. In these difficult days when my patience was tested to its limits and admittedly, well beyond them, I clung to the increasingly thin thread of an idea that perhaps I could snatch a student like Ambrose from the grinding wheels of this so-called march of improvement.

In my thirteen years there, I had seen some wonderful things, to be sure. A boy from my first year named Nicholas had graduated and was now earning a meagre but honest wage as a blacksmith, thanks to his education at Field Lane. Another boy wrote to me from Canada. I say “boy,” but Martin was a man of twenty-three now. Martin worked as a carpenter and craftsman in Toronto and married a Canadian girl named Margaret. They were expecting their first child.

But for every Nicholas and Martin, there were a dozen others who, to my knowledge, never escaped the poverty in which they were born, and I was beginning to see the children of the children I had met thirteen years ago. A girl named Agnes had been one of my first students. Agnes, barely old enough to conceive, had borne a little girl named Lily who was now among the smallest children at the school. I had given myself utterly to this work and to these children for more than a decade now, but all my years of work, all my self-giving, seemed to be one small drop of fresh water in a bucket of squalor. What real hope could I offer a boy like Ambrose, or for that matter a girl like Cordelia, when I had lost all hope of my own?

When at last the clock struck three, my head still ringing with its ache and my nose somehow still throbbing with its injury, I dismissed the students with as much pleasantness as I could muster. Cordelia came forward, her eyes only glancing up at mine from the floor.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Cratchit, for smacking you with my boots this morning.”

“That’s all right, Cordelia. Go home and we can try to do better on the morrow, yes?”

“Yes, sir,” she replied, and walked repentantly from the classroom.

Ambrose came forward as well.

“Thank you, Mr. Cratchit,” he said. “I really liked the story of Mr. Jonar!”

“You’re welcome, Ambrose. Come back tomorrow and we’ll hear another story, all right?”

“I will, Mr. Cratchit!”

He embraced me with a filial vigour that sent a lump into my throat.

“I’m off to work now,” he said, and I blushed as I remembered that this child’s day of study did not conclude with the play a boy deserved, but with at least several hours of chimney sweeping.

“Good-bye, Ambrose. I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

“G’bye, Mr. Cratchit! See you tomorrow!” he said as he sped out the door.

But I didn’t see Ambrose Swidger at school the next day.

It was not uncommon for a child such as Ambrose to be absent for a day or even a week at a time. Very little in their lives was stable, and many children came and went accordingly. In his ten years, Ambrose had worked several jobs whose long varying hours had occasionally prevented him from attending school. I only hoped that he might at least be afforded some special joy on Christmas, and not be left to sweeping that day.

When I awoke on Christmas Eve morning, it was as if there were a heavy chain around my chest, shackled to God knows what invisible weight. With great effort, I arose. My crippled foot smarted this morning, a not uncommon occurrence as of late. My morning routine was slow and deliberate, each part requiring a great force of determination. I did not want to go to school that day, and it was not because I dreaded teaching. Quite the opposite. I knew that this Christmas Eve Day would be a festive one, with carols and games replacing lessons and schoolwork. I knew each carol would remind me that Uncle Scrooge was gone, and that each game would fill me with a longing to be rid of this terrible emptiness.

But proceed I did, and with a great sigh, stepped forth from my front door. Snow covered everything in sight, and the chill of the air was unusually harsh. With each breath it rushed into my lungs as a gale through an open door.

I would have to walk by way of Whitecross Market, as the children would be expecting Mr. Cratchit to arrive with treats and sweeties for Christmas Eve Day. All the schoolmasters arrived with some such present for their students this day.

When I arrived at the market it was a veritable storm of sound and bustle. A woman wearing a mob cap festooned with a ridiculous red bob, no doubt in the spirit of the season, was haggling with a screech for a cheaper price on her plum cakes. Another man, promising the lowest price on his hot mince pies, shouted like a lunatic. I stopped at the first stall I spotted, and in a glance I saw that the fat man selling his confections bore profuse perspiration on his broad, mutton-chopped face. I could trace the journey of each drop from the top of his bald head to the tip of his wide nose. I wondered how a man could be sweating on the twenty-fourth of December, in this weather, and wondered also how much of the sweat of his brow ended up in his sweets.

“Give me a half pound of humbugs,” I said.

He handed me the bag, I handed him a coin, and I left the market as swiftly as my cane could carry me. I noticed a sharp pain beginning to pulse upward from my afflicted foot, but pressed on toward the school with such speediness as I could muster.

When I arrived at Field Lane, Miss Micklewhite was coming to the doors just a few steps behind me. A fellow teacher, she was of a quiet but affable character, and had been with us at Field Lane for over a year now. I held the door for her as she smiled and gave a gracious thank you. I returned the smile, and I believe it was the first person for whom I had managed a smile that day.

“Merry Christmas, Mr. Cratchit,” she said in her quiet yet joyful way.

“Merry Christmas,” I responded, still straining at a smile.

A little girl from her class ran to her and greeted her cheerfully, and she petted the girl’s head in an effortlessly maternal fashion as the child embraced her and wished her a happy Christmas. The child dragged her teacher off to see her friends, and Miss Micklewhite offered an apologetic wave and a smile as she happily obliged her conductor.

She was immediately ensconced in a boisterous game of Blindman’s Buff, laughing and running without restraint as any child would. It was not below her dignity to do so, and it struck me that in fact it was part of her dignity to do so. For those brief moments as I gazed at Miss Micklewhite, running about blindfolded and laughing, it was as if someone hidden and beautiful was being revealed to me. Or at least, was about to be revealed, like the first pecks of an innocent chick at its shell. I felt as though my heart was on the brink of understanding something, but only on the brink.

It was her hair that seemed to send this invitation to her mystery. It was a sparrow’s brown colour, tied back in its usual way, but as she played, small strands fell out of place and danced across her left cheek. This drew me to the beauty of her laughing eyes. She played and she laughed with abandon with these children whom I had lately found so difficult to love.

Miss Micklewhite, still laughing, tore off her blindfold and excused herself from the game. Her face alight, she came walking back toward me. It felt to me as if a window had been cracked open into the soul of this woman, and I wanted with all my heart to look inside.

That’s when Cordelia rushed upon me and I was sent sprawling to the ground.

She had come upon me in an excited run with an intended affectionate embrace, but, standing in an unsteady position for the purpose of nursing the ache in my foot, my stance was unsteady and her embrace bowled me over. Somehow still clutching tightly to my cane in one hand and the sweeties in the other, the pain in my foot sent a well of tears to my eyes. I’m ashamed to admit that rage was the first emotion which arose in me, and I crammed down my ire with the greatest force of will I could muster.

“Sorry, Mister Cratchit, sir!” said Cordelia as she hopped to her feet. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Cratchit sir!”

“Merry Christmas, Cordelia,” I said as I rose unsteadily.

“Merry Christmas, Miss Micklewhite!” She said with another forceful embrace.

“Merry Christmas, Cordelia,” said Miss Micklewhite, full of good humour.

Cordelia’s eyes seized instantly upon the bag of sweets in my hand.

“Can I have a sweetie, Mister Cratchit?” she asked, eyes wide as sovereigns.

“May I have a sweetie,” corrected Miss Micklewhite.

“Oh I’m sure you may too, Miss Micklewhite,” answered Cordelia. “Mister Cratchit is right nice.”

I reached into the bag and handed two humbugs to each of them. For the second time today, Miss Micklewhite could elicit a smile from my lips in spite of myself.

“Thanks, Mister Cratchit! Ho!! Albert!! Mister Cratchit’s got confections!!”

Thus began the scramble.

Albert, in the end, was the last child who passed for some sweeties.

“Please, sir, may I have some more, sir? For Ambrose?” said Albert. “I want to save him some.”

“Is he here?” I asked, looking about the room.

“No, Mister Cratchit,” said Albert. “He’s in the hospital.”

“My goodness,” said I. “Is he alright?”

Albert became very solemn. “I… I don’t think he is, Mister Cratchit sir. He’s hurt his head, and I think it’s… well I believe it might be looking ill for him, sir. I only heard yesterday after school.”

Miss Micklewhite and I exchanged looks of alarm.

“What happened?” I asked, an uneasy knot forming in my stomach.

“I don’t know ‘zactly, sir,” said Albert. “But it happened when he was chimney sweeping, sir. I think he fell down a flue.”

Of all the jobs Ambrose had worked, chimney sweeping was the most dangerous. Forced up a chimney nearly naked, he was made to scrape at the chimney walls with a brush, breathing in the black soot. Boys who didn’t become ill with “sweeps’ consumption” often broke bones or suffered even worse fates. There have been laws against this practice for decades; perhaps one day they’ll be enforced. I felt again the anger inside me. It felt as if it were now brewing in a boiling cauldron along with these three years of sadness and futility.

“Which hospital is he in, Albert?” I asked.

“St Thomas’s, sir.”

“Thank you, Albert,” I stammered. “I… I’ll go see him right away.”

Miss Micklewhite said something, though I could no longer hear her. I felt her hand touch my shoulder, I looked at her, but I could muster no response. It seemed that if I’d tried to speak, something else would escape: a curse or a cry I did not know.

Moments later I stepped from the doors of the school and into the snow-covered street, hobbling my way toward the Thames and St Thomas’s. The sun was doubly bright against the snow and the air was still bitter cold. My face quickly became numb with the biting chill. The sounds of the busy street, from the clops and creaks of hansom cabs to the cries of street sellers, seemed to become a single, dull murmur in my ears, and though a hundred people bustled past me, I saw none of them. I could only see the face of the child perhaps near death, and watch the uneven rhythm of my own feet: the step of my left foot and the drag of my right. When I looked up again I realised I was now on Blackfriars Bridge. The dome of St Paul’s, wreathed in frost, stood in the middle distance and glinted in the harsh sun, blinding my straining eyes.

Outside St Thomas’s, the cold air yet carried the scents of the street: a mix of manure and refuse, coal smoke and cooked meat from a vendor’s handcart. As I stepped through the doors of the great red brick hospital, these scents were replaced by the harsh, tar-like odour of carbolic acid and the vague smell of sickness. Inquiring for Ambrose’s bed, I was led by a nurse whose plump, red cheeks gave the blue of her smock a purplish hue.

“I’m afraid he’s not doin’ too well yet,” she told me as she wiped her brow. “Still not conscious. His mum’s been with ’im all night and all day, poor thing. I ain’t seen a father about. I reckon he’s not ‘in the matter’, as they say. Poor, poor thing.”

“Poor thing,” I repeated softly.

We entered a room with almost thirty other beds, all with another “poor thing” lying in them. The sun had only begun to sink in the afternoon sky, but the tall curtains were drawn and the room was dark.

“I’m sorry for the dark, sir, but the light hurts the brain in cases like his. If he does come about, or when he does come about I mean, we don’t want to worsen his pain.”

When we came to Ambrose’s bed, his mother was seated next to him, her head resting on the edge of his cot and her arms resting across his legs, as if she had fallen asleep in prayer. She looked to me like an image of Christ in Gethsemane and the Pieta in the same moment. I did not stir her from what I was sure was a rare moment of rest, but stood looking upon the little boy whose laughter once blessed my ears, now silent in an unnatural sleep.

His head was bandaged, and his breathing came in soft gulps.

“Do you know, ma’am,” I whispered to the nurse, “his prognosis?”

She shook her head. “The doctor said that much depends on if he wakes quite soon. If he doesn’t… Well, sir, it’s already been a coupla days, you see, and…. Well we must pray, sir.”

I did begin to pray, but stopped short. I was too angry with Him for conversation or requests.

I know not how long I stood there, but when I came to myself again the nurse was nowhere in sight. I placed my hand upon Ambrose’s cheek, then turned and walked away.

Poor thing.

An hour later I was once again watching my feet walking below me in their distinctive cripple’s rhythm, my cane tapping the stone with every other step. My crippled foot sent a continuous piercing fire from my heel to the small of my back.

There were carollers roaming the streets, spreading the joy of Christmas Eve and what sounded like so much drivel. All I could hear in it was mockery. “Joy to the World!” they sang, but the very idea of joy proclaimed to a world which crushes its innocents in the devilish wheels of industry was an affront to my senses. I saw little Ambrose, smiling and raising his hand in Scripture class. I saw him nearly lifeless in a crowded hospital room, a sacrificial lamb for the triumphs of this mechanical age. I saw Cordelia and Agnes and Lily and Albert, hopelessly caught in the same iron maws. My leg persisted with burning pain and sent lightning bolts of agony into my back as my sadness turned to rage.

I came to my door, and I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the brass doorknob, my face grotesquely distorted. I turned the knob and stepped inside and slammed the door behind me. My crippled foot finally failed me, my cane slipped, and I fell flat on the floor.

When at last I found the strength to climb to my feet, I took my cane and flung it across the room with a cry of rage. It landed with a crash into a vase. I limped and winced my way to the staircase, each step sending a deeper shock of pain into my back than the one before.

I found my way to the bedroom, but I did not get as far as my bed. A last, blinding shot of pain flashed through my body, and I was a heap on the crimson carpet. I couldn’t have stood if I’d tried. I was crushed beneath a weight of grief and anger which Atlas himself could not have lifted.

As I lay there, I thought of Ebenezer Scrooge. If what he had told me was true, that Christmas had a Spirit of life and hope and joy, it had long been extinguished on earth by the Spirit of the Present Age, the Spirit of greed and despair and death.

Before his conversion Scrooge used to say that Christmas had done no one any real good, and kindness and goodness and love along with it. It was a sham, he said. “A humbug!”

I wondered now if he’d been right all along.

I cursed God for his complicity. “And what have You done?” I shouted. “How have You helped? What profit is Christmas if the innocent still die? Of what use is kindness when the wicked prosper?”

My shouting fell to a whisper.

“Humbug,” I said.

And I fell asleep on the floor.