Scrooge's Countinghouse

Seven Christmas Eves have passed and Majo Rika Scrooge remains as a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner as ever. Old Scrooge sat busy in her countinghouse. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and she could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement-stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already: it had not been light all day: and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighboring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

The door of Scrooge's countinghouse was open that she might keep her eye upon her clerk, Doremi Crachit, who in a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but Doremi's fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one coal. But she couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept the coal-box in her own room; and so surely as Doremi came in with the shovel, the mistress predicted that it would benecessary for them to part. Wherefore Doremi put on her pink comforter, and tried to warm herself at the candle; in which effort, not being a woman of a strong imagination, she failed. Suddenly, the door opens, and in comes Scrooge's cheerful niece, Momoko.

Momoko: A merry Christmas, aunt! God save you!

Scrooge: Bah! Humbug!

Momoko: Christmas a humbug, aunt! You don't mean that!

Scrooge: Merry Christmas. What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You're poor enough.

Momoko: What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You're rich enough.

Scrooge: (angrily) Humbug!

Momoko: Don't be cross, aunt.

Scrooge: What else can I be when I live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas! Out upon 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; a time for balancing your books and having every item in 'em through a round dozen of months presented dead against you? If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with "Merry Christmas" on her lips, should be boiled in her own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through her heart!

Momoko: (pleading) Aunt!

Scrooge: (sternly) Niece! Keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.

Momoko: Keep ti? But you don't keep it.

Scrooge: Let me leave it alone, then. Much good may it do you! Much good it has ever done you!

Momoko: There are many things from which I might have derived good, by which I have not profited. Christmas among the rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time, when it only come round–apart from the veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything belonging to it can be apart from that–as a good time: a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time: the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, aunt, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!

Doremi involuntarily applauded. Scrooge steps off her chair and holds her ruler threateningly to her clerk.

Scrooge: (through gritted teeth) Let me hear another sound from you, Cratchit, and you'll keep your Christmas by losing your situation.

Doremi returns to the tank and resumes her work. Scrooges turns back to her niece.

Scrooge: You're quite a powerful speaker, ma'am. I wonder you don't go into Parliament.

Momoko: Don't be cross, aunt. Come! Dine with us tomorrow.

Scrooge: I would see you in Hell first.

Momoko: But why? Why so cold-hearted, aunt? Why?

Scrooge: Why did you get married?

Momoko: Because I fell in love.

Scrooge: Because...you fell...in love? (returning to work) Good afternoon.

Momoko: I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you; why can't we be friends?

Scrooge: (sternly) Good afternoon.

Momoko: I'm sorry, with all my heart, to find you so resolute. We have never had any quarrel, to which I have been a party. But I have made the trial in homage to Christmas, and I'll keep my Christmas humor to the last. So therefore A Merry Christmas, aunt!

Scrooge: (annoyed) Good afternoon!

Momoko: And A Happy New Year!

Scrooge: (angrily) Good afternoon!

Momoko: (to Doremi) A very Merry Christmas to you, Mrs. Cratchit.

Doremi: Merry Christmas to you, ma'am.

Momoko leaves.

Scrooge: There's another one. A clerk, making fifteen magic spheres a-week, and with a husband and family, talking about a merry Christmas. I'll retire to Bedlam.

The door opens and two portly witches, Mota and Motamota, enter. They have books and papers in their hands.

Motamota: (to Doremi) Scrooge and Marley's, I believe?

Doremi shows them to her employer, and they step in Scrooge's office.

Motamota: (presenting her card) Have I the pleasure of addressing Miss Scrooge, or Miss Marley?

Scrooge: Miss Marley has been dead these seven years. She died seven years ago, this very night. (takes card)

Motamota: Oh. Well, we have no doubt her generosity is well represented by her surviving partner. At this festive season of the year, Miss Scrooge, it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, ma'am.

Scrooge holds the card to her candle.

Scrooge: Are there no prisons?

She sets the card ablaze. Motamota snatches the card and extinguishes the small flame.

Motamota: Prisons? Yes, plenty of prisons.

Scrooge: And the Union workhouses? Are they still in operation?

Motamota: They are. I wish I could say they were not.

Scooge: The Treadmill in full vigour?

Motamota: Very busy, ma'am.

Scrooge: Good! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course.

Motamota: At this festive season, a few of us are endeavoring to raise the fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. What shall we put you done for?

Scrooge: Nothing!

Motamota: Oh. You wish to be anonymous?

Scrooge: (slamming fist down) I wish to be left alone! Since you ask me what I wish, ladies, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas, and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.

Motamota: Many can't go there; and quite frankly, many would rather die.

Scrooge: If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population. Good afternoon, ladies!

Motamota: Good afternoon.

Seeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue their point, the witches withdrew. As the afternoon has gone by, the hour of shutting up the countinghouse has arrived. With an ill-will Scrooge dismounted from her stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant clerk in the Tank, who instantly snuffed her candle out, and put on her hat.

Scrooge: You'll want all day tomorrow, I suppose?

Doremi: If it's quite convenient, ma'am.

Scrooge: It is not convenient, and it's not fair. If I was to stop a magic seed for it, you'd think yourself ill used. And yet you don't think me ill used, when I pay a day's wages for no work.

Doremi: It's only once a year, ma'am.

Scrooge: A poor excuse for picking a woman's pocket every twenty-fifth of December! But I suppose you must have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next morning!

Doremi promised that she would; and Scrooge walked out with a growl. The office was closed in a twinkling, and Doremi, with the long ends of her pink comforter dangling below her waist (for she boasted no great-coat), went down a slide on Cornhill, at the end of a lane of girls, twenty times, in honour of its being Christmas-eve, and then ran home to Camden Town as hard as she could pelt.