Instead of Scrooge

John Stewart Collis

T n one of his letters Wilhelm von 'Humboldt wrote: 'All that is truly great in life centres around the sense of sorrow. But in their ignorance ordinary men are oblivious to this and rebel against care and sorrow, which they would otherwise welcome as their faithful companions.'

I think of those words each year as Christmas approaches and Scrooge is once again wheeled on for our lack of entertain- ment. Not only is the story so terribly ham, but Dickens wrote it in a spirit highly un- suitable for the tone of his theme. He was behaving towards his publishers, Chapman and Hall, rather like Scrooge himself, a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner', demanding a prodigious sum of money for the story, and unsatisfied with the sales.

We could so easily have The Haunted Man instead. If the production were entire-

ly without gimmicks, and the narrator and

chief actor really quiet in delivery, then the fable might well be enjoyed without any

phoney feelings whatsoever. I may not be the best judge of the story, for as a child I was enthralled by its driving rhythm, and if I am still captivated, that may be only loyalty — though I don't think so. Anyway the theme is quite well summarised by the quotation from Wilhelm von Humboldt with which I opened this article.

`Everyone said so.' Thus the tale begins. Everyone said that Mr Redlaw — a one- time brilliant lecturer in chemistry — look- ed like a haunted man. It was in his ap- pearance; his hollow cheek, his sunken eye, his sombre clothes, his battered face — 'as if he had been through his whole life, a lonely mark for the chafing and beating of the great deep of humanity.' It was in his manner: taciturn, retiring, gloomy, shadowed, and with the air of one who perpetually listened to some old echoes in his mind that would not pass from him. It was in his voice: deep and grave and steeped in the melody of melancholy. It was in his dwelling: solitary and dark and choked by surrounding buildings, and in his own lone- ly room with its worm-eaten beams.

And now we see him sitting in his room on a bleak December day, as the twilight falls, and the wind blows down the chimney, and snowflakes beat against the window. Presently a meal is brought in to him by his housekeeper, and he holds con- verse with her and her husband and his grandfather who is 87. They wish him a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

He cannot enter into their spirit and can only murmur — 'Another Christmas come, another year gone! More figures in the lengthening sum of recollection that we work and work at to our torment, till Death idly jumbles all together and rubs all out.' But the old man of 87, who has come in with a bunch of holly for Christmas decora- tions, is glad to keep his memory green. He enjoys decorating the room with branches and berries, for it reminds him of the past, and he says, 'It seems to me that the birth- time of our Lord was the birth-time of all I ever had affection for, or mourned for.'

When they have gone the Chemist sits gazing at the fire. And while he sits there in the gloom, in the dread, listening silence of his solitary abode, a Shadow thickens behind him, and gradually, by some magic means, becomes a Shape — and the Shape is the ghostly image of himself. And as the Chemist leaned his arm upon the elbow of his chair, ruminating before the fire, the Spectre leaned upon the chair-back, close above him, with its appalling copy of his face looking where his face looked, and bearing the expression his face bore.

"Here again!" said the Chemist. "Here again!" replied the Phantom.

"I see you in the fire," said the haunted man. "I hear you in music, in the wind, in the dead stillness of the night."

The Phantom moved its head, assenting. "Why do you come to haunt me thus?" "1 come as I am called," replied the Ghost.

"No! Unbidden!" exclaimed the Chemist.

"Unbidden be it," said the Spectre. "It is enough. I am here." ' Thus, in this lonely room, in the old for- saken house, with the wind howling out- side, and all the unimaginable millions of stars above them — these two, the Man and his Darker Self, hold converse.

'There's a letter for you from the VAT inspector.' It is about the Past that they speak. The Chemist had been neglected in his youth, and starved of affection, but when he was fighting his way upward in the world he did find a friend and lavished upon him his love and trust. And he had a sister whom he adored. At last there came into his life a girl whom he aspired to marry when he had enough money. The future seemed to shine. But the light went out. All his hopes were blasted. His dreams became delusions. For his friend, his one dear friend, fell in love with his girl, and both of them abandoned him. And his sister, who loved the faithless friend, soon died.

Thus he bears an ever-haunting memory, the memory of a sorrow and a wrong, and now when he hears the Ghost say, 'If I could forget my sorrow and wrong, I would,' he cries out, 'Evil spirit of myself, my life is darkened by that incessant whisper.'

Then the Phantom in this fable becomes more than this man's other self, he becomes a Magician who can grant him his wish he becomes a Tempter. He has the power to cancel in the Chemist's mind recollections of the past.

The Chemist wavers. For he fears the Phantom and divines some danger in the offered gift. 'Decide!' cries the Spectre. `Decide, before the opportunity is lost!'

"A moment! I call Heaven to witness," said the agitated man, "that I have never been a hater of my kind — never morose, indifferent, or hard, to anything around me. If, living here alone, I have made too much of all that was and might have been, and too little of what is, the evil, I believe, has fallen on me, and not on others. But, if there were poison in my body, should I not, possessed of antidotes and knowledge how to use them, use them? If there be poison in my mind, and through this fearful Shadow I can cast it out, shall I not cast it out?"

"Say," said the Spectre, "Is it done?"

"A moment longer!" he answered hur- riedly. "I would forget it if I could! Have / thought that, alone, or has it been the thought of thousands upon thousands, generation after generation? All human misery is fraught with sorrow and trouble. My memory is as the memory of other men, but other men have not this choice. Yes, I close the bargain. Yes, I wit.i. forget my sorrow, wrong and trouble!"

"Say," said the Spectre, "is it done?" "It is!"

"IT is. And take this with you, man whom I here renounce! The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you will. Without recovering yourself the power that you have yielded up, you shall hence- forth destroy its like in all whom you ap- proach. Your wisdom has discovered that the memory of sorrow, wrong, and trouble is the lot of all mankind, and that mankind would be the happier, in its other memories, without it. Go! Be its benefac- tor! Freed from such remembrance, from this hour, carry involuntarily the blessing of such freedom with you. Its diffusion is in- separable and inalienable from you. Go! Be happy in the good you have won, and in the good you do!" ' The Phantom, which had held its bloodless hand above him while it spoke, as if in some unholy invocation, or some ban, now melted from before him, and was gone.

The Chemist, fearing to go out that night, sits down again before the fire, with the words echoing in his ears — 'The gift that I have given, you shall give again, go where you Next day he decides to call upon one of his students who is ill. He has been told about this by his housekeeper Milly, a very kind, dear person. In order to reach this student's room he must first pass through the house of a family called the Tetterbys. Mr and Mrs Tetterby are poor and have a hard struggle to keep going and feed their swarm of children. But they are held together by their love — a love that is for- tified by the memory of the inseparable joys and sorrows they have shared.

But when the Chemist, while seeking to reach the student's room, knocks at the door and is admitted, he sees them becom- ing selfish and irritable. He has snapped the bonds that held them together! Appalled, he goes upstairs and finds that he has a like evil influence upon the student — for in giv- ing him the gift of forgetfulness of wrong and sorrow, he finds that he has also deprived him of the gift of gratitude. Wherever he goes he brings this curse with him. Even the most depraved creatures are made worse than he found them, for he renders them incapable of the softening ef- fect of sorrow and remorse. And so it goes on, and he is driven frantic by the dreadful gift that he is given and the dreadful in- fluence he spreads. He grasps the truth 'In the material world as I have long taught, nothing can be spared; no step or atom in the wondrous structure could be lost, without a blank being made in the great universe. I know, now, that it is the same with good and evil, happiness and sorrow, in the memories of men!' And he cries out in agony — 'Shadow of myself. Spirit of my darker hours! Come back, and haunt me day and night, but take this gift away! Or, if it must still rest with me, deprive me of the dreadful power of giving it to others. Undo what I have done. Leave me benighted, but restore the day to those whom I have cursed.'

The gift has been bestowed. The gift has been diffused. Can it be reversed?

The Phantom returns and speaks to him again. But this time with less malignance and with some hint of help. It tells him that he may seek out Milly, and that his curse will not fall on her (for in this fable Milly stands for the embodiment of his better wisdom). He does seek her out — and he finds that his influence does not work on her. Moreover, wherever she goes the curse is reversed. Unconsciously she exerts this Power and sets to right the misery he has caused. And as the Chemist goes about with Milly, and follows all she says and all she does, as if striving to learn some lesson she could give him, she says, 'I have no learning and you have much. I am not used to think, and you are always thinking. May I tell you why it seems to me a good thing to remember wrong that has been done us?'

'Yes,' 'That we may forgive it.'

'Pardon me, great Heaven!' cries the Chemist lifting up his eyes, 'for having thrown away Thine own high attribute!'

'And if your memory should one day be restored, as we all hope and pray it may, would it not be a blessing to you to recall at once a wrong and its forgiveness?'

Even as she speaks he begins to feel a movement in his mind as of memory return- ing. And one day they come upon the

Chemist's faithless friend — now a penni- less man, rejected and brought low. The Chemist now feels no desire to gloat upon his downfall: but rather to exercise other feelings than those of rage and resentment. He sees that there is another way of meeting calamity and facing wrong: there is the way of redemption through the forgiveness of sin. He forgives his one-time friend. He does more: he helps him with a sum of money to regain his self-respect and build his life once more. And as the Chemist begins to recognise that his new attitude is a way of salvation, then the unwonted hardness of his features relaxes and becomes softened by the thought of sorrow; and at last we see that he is no longer haunted.