Марджери Аллингем - Mystery for Christmas and Other Stories

Duross gulped and nodded.

Koenig spoke. “Your name is not Hippie, officer, it’s Santa Claus. You have given her the ring she would have given her life for, you have given him an out on a charge of attempted fraud, and you have given me a crossoff on a claim. That’s the ticket! That’s the old yuletide spirit! Merry Christmas!”

“Nuts,” Art said contemptuously, and turned and marched from the room, down the stairs, and out to the sidewalk. As he headed in the direction of the station house he decided that he would tone it down a little in his report. Getting a name for being tough was okay, but not too damn tough. That insurance guy sure was dumb, calling him Santa Claus — him, Art Hippie, feeling as he did about Christmas.

Which reminded him, Christmas Eve would be a swell time for the murder.

So Ebenezer Scrooge, that squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner was led into the past, the present, and the future by three apparitions on Christmas Eve, and the horrors that he witnessed, which were his own life and death, convinced him that he’d better repent or else. Not merely in word, but in deed, for his fears of moral retribution were profound. Next morning, while still in his nightcap, he rewarded a boy handsomely to run to the poulterer’s and have a turkey the size of Tiny Tim sent to the humble home of the Cratchit family. After consuming a bowl of gruel and a cup of tea with more relish than such feeble fare justified, he brushed the coal dust from his cuffs and went off on a cold, clear, Christmas Day to join his nephew Fred and family at their holiday feast. Scrooge delighted the children with gifts in his hard-as-flint fists and astonished the grownups with a steady smile on his bloodless face. He tasted of the spiced wassail and joined in the carols in bold voice and bounced their son and daughter upon his knee. It was like old times, with the kind of merriment he had enjoyed so unashamedly at Fezziwig’s establishment. (Those were the days when he was a mere apprentice with Dick Wilkins, good old Dick Wilkins, who had been very attached to him — long before Ebenezer’s soul had been twisted into an ugly thing by the connivances of commerce.) Later that night, when the cheer had simmered down, and the fire had withdrawn its flames, and a slab of clouds had blocked out the stars, and a cold mist was pressing against the windows, Ebenezer Scrooge, with a wave of his hand, alighted from the glowing doorway of his nephew’s home and headed into the gloom of nineteenth century London. It was that sort of penetrating gloom which of times follows hard on the heels of a frolicsome occasion, the way the brightest and most pleasant of rooms becomes dank and dreary when plunged into the bitter darkness of a winter’s night. It was the gloom of death itself.

Ebenezer stepped cautiously through the slippery skin of snow that had settled upon the cobblestones, for he was mortal and, as he had reminded the Ghost of Christmas Past, liable to fall. It was feet-stamping cold, and his breath crystallized with each exhalation. The bleakness was so concentrated it seemed to muffle the sputtering gas lamps along his route, but it did not extinguish the gladness in Scrooge’s heart, which radiated on the fuel of his recent salvation. So altered was his attitude that as he walked in the direction of his chambers, he kept an expectant eye out for a carriage to carry him forth. Not since he’d been young and wasteful had he hired a carriage; on this particular evening, however, he felt a strong desire to be accompanied by the happy clacking of hoofs and to impress the cabman with a generosity befitting the season. Scrooge spotted a few such conveyances, shiny through the frozen mists, one of them with holly wound in the spokes of its great wheels. But each was loaded with people and packages and the sounds of mirth, hurrying on toward yet another festivity in celebration of the birth of Christ. By the time he came upon a carriage that was free — a young couple was laughing as they stepped down from the sturdy black vehicle, its springs jouncing from the quick loss of weight — Scrooge had already covered three-quarters of the distance to his rooms. And though the air was as harsh as a rasp, he decided to complete his journey by foot. It seemed more trouble to get in and out of the carriage than the short trip warranted. Besides, a long walk on Christmas night was good for the heart and satisfying to the soul, and a man of business in his time of life had to be attentive to both.

The windows of the low brick houses were gleaming with candles and oil lamps, and the scent of baked breads and sweetmeats wafted over the streets. A few men and women wrapped in green and red scarves bobbed past him on the narrow walk. “Merry Christmas!” said they, raising their hats or saluting, though he did not recognize any of them. Scrooge fingered the brim of his tall hat and smiled as best he could, his cracked face aching from having crowded thirty years of smiling into a single day. What the ghosts had demonstrated to him the previous evening appeared to be decidedly true: There was joy, perhaps even a certain profit, to be collected from being pleasant, from being charitable to others.

Not everyone on that particular London street, on that particular Christmas night, was unknown to Ebenezer Scrooge. Hurrying along on the opposite walk was one Jonathan Wurdlewart, who had business with the firm of Scrooge & Marley. Indeed, his loan was due that very night. And when Wurdlewart spotted a gray-faced old man in a tall black hat moving slowly but with a distinct delight in his step, greeting people as they passed, the debtor ducked into an alley and stared out from the shadows. “It can’t be,” Wurdlewart muttered, rubbing his tired eyes, “it just can’t be.” After the old man had passed, and the debtor saw that it was indeed Scrooge himself, he cursed him under his breath as a hypocrite as well as a usurer. For a long while Wurdlewart remained in the shadows, as if pondering what course of action to take. At last he began moving in the direction Scrooge had gone.

Scrooge turned off the broad street and down a narrow byway, and before long this brought him into the district of warehouses and factories and counting houses, not far from where he had inhabited a suite of rooms as cheerless as the London morgue. Those who had a choice did not wish to live amidst the clank of machinery and the clink of coins, to hear the cries of children when they were struck for lack of productivity. Scrooge resided here to be closer to his commercial interests at all times and because rents were far cheaper. (The rest of the rooms in the lowering pile of stone in which he resided were let out as offices.) Others lived out their time nearby because there was nowhere else for them to go. On this singular night of the year the workers were huddled in their drafty, wretched dwellings, many without coal for their fires; some had no more than boiled potatoes for their tables, the skins of which were served as a side dish to introduce variety to their meals. Their windows were mostly dark. In this district the streets were solitary, and the doorways were cut into black relief, and loose windows rattled in their frames, and the debris of manufacture flapped in the gutters, and the alleys were as grim as the grave. Considering all this, it is little wonder that Scrooge was gradually overtaken by a feeling that someone was following him, and he turned around quickly, but saw no one. It is little wonder the smile fell away from his face and he began to think about time: In a few days yet another year in his paltry allotment of years would be gone, and he would not be another hour richer.

As he came upon his countinghouse, with the weathered sign nailed above the door — Scrooge & Marley — the old man spotted something that made him feel as if a headstone had toppled over into his soul. Across the street from his place of business there was a single lamp burning in the window of Pennerpinch, Ltd. So Gladnought Pennerpinch, Ebenezer’s long-time and despised competitor, was working on Christmas night, trying to grab an advantage over Scrooge & Marley! Ebenezer stood as dead-still as a doornail on the crusty walk, regretting passionately having given Cratchit the day off. At year’s end we should both have been going over the accounts so as not to fall behind, he thought, so as not to permit that scoundrel Pennerpinch to steal the bread from my mouth! And he clenched his bony fist and shook it at the smoke-blackened brick establishment across the way.