The popping became louder, like faraway fireworks over the Thames on Coronation Day, or the ice slowly breaking on a March day. There was a smell of hot metal in the air; the sharp odor before a thunderstorm, but without heat or dampness. And then it was there, in the room behind the chair!
It was a looming figure, far above normal height, shrouded in a gown of copper and mica, and above its head, at its top, glowing green and jagged with purple, was one of Faraday’s Needles . . .
* * *
The listeners jerked back, as always. There was a rustle of crinoline and starch as they hunkered back down. Most knew the story as they knew their own hearts, but the effect on them was always the same.
Dickens knew why; for when he had written those words more than two decades before, his own hair had stood on end as if he were in the very presence of the Motility Factor itself.
It was from that moment on in the writing of The Christmas Garland that he had never wavered, never slowed down; it was that moment when, overcome by tiredness at his desk, he had flung himself and his hat and cane out into the (in those days) dark London night, and had walked till dawn, out to Holborn, up Duckett Lane, across to Seven Sisters, and back up and down Vauxhall Bridge Road, to come in again just as the household was rising, and throw himself fully clothed across his bed, to sleep for an hour, and then, rising, go back to his ink bottle and quills.
* * *
The crackling sound grew louder as the Spirit shook his raiment, and a spark danced between the Needle and the ceiling, leaving a bright blue spot there to slowly fade as Eben Mizer watched, fascinated as a bird before a snake.
“Know that I am the Spirit of Christmases Current, Eben Mizer. Know that I am in the form that the men who hire your accountancy worship, as you worship the money that flows, like the Motive Force itself, from them to you.”
“What do you wish of me?” asked Eben. The Spirit laughed, and a large gust of blue washed over the room, as if day had come and gone in an instant.
“Wish? Nothing. I am only to show you what takes place this Christmas.”
“You mean this past day?”
“Past? Oh, very well, as you will!” The Spirit laughed again. “Take my hand.”
“I will be vulcanized in an instant!” said Mizer.
“No, you shall not.” It held out an empty sleeve. Mizer felt invisible fingers take his. “Come,” said the Spirit. “Hold on to me.”
There was a feeling of lightness in Mizer’s head—he became a point of light, as the flash of a meteor across the heavens, or the dot of a lightning-bug against an American night, and they were outside his nephew’s house in the daylight.
“As before, you are neither seen nor heard,” said the Spirit of Christmases Current. “Walk through this wall with me.” They did, but Mizer had the sensation that instead of walking directly through they had, in a twinkling, gone up the windowpane, across the roof tiles, down the heated air of the chimney, across the ceiling, and into the room just inside the window, too fast to apprehend. The effect was the same, from outside to inside, but Eben Mizer had the memory of doing it the long way . . .
* * *
Dickens’s voice became high, thin and merry as he took on the younger tones of Mizer’s nephew, his nephew’s wife, their in-laws and guests at the party where they were settling in for a game of charades before the Christmas meal.
Actors on the stage of the time said that Dickens was the greatest actor of his age; others thought it beneath his dignity to do the readings—authors should be paid to publish books, not read them for money. Some of his readings he had dropped after they did not have the desired effect—comic or pathetic or terrific—on the audience. Others he had prepared but never given, because they had proved unsatisfying to him. By the time any reading had joined his repertoire, he had rehearsed it twenty-five times before its debut.
He knew that he was a good actor—if he had not gone into journalism, covering the courts and the Parliament when a youth, he would have gone on the stage—but he knew he was not great. He knew it was the words and the acting that had made his readings such a success. No matter how many times they had read and heard them, audiences still responded to them as if they had come newly dry from his pen that very morning.
Dickens paused for another drink from the glass, mopped his brow with the handkerchief that a moment before had been Mizer’s nightcap. The audience waited patiently, the slight hum of the fans in the ceiling purring to let the accumulated warmth of fifteen hundred bodies escape into the cold night. The glow from the selenium lights against the magenta screen added nothing to the heat.
He put the glass down, eyes twinkling, and went back to his reading.
* * *
“If only my uncle were here,” said his nephew.
“Oh, why bother?” asked his pretty young wife. “He’s probably at his office counting out more profits from the Greater Cumberland and Smythe-Jones Motility Factory, or the United Batchford Motive-Force Delivery Service. And no doubt got poor Bob Cratchitt there with him, chained to his stool . . .”
“Hush, please,” asked the nephew.
“Well, it’s true. A man like Eben Mizer. He does sums for seventeen different power-brokers, yet his office is still lit with candles! He lets poor Cratchitt freeze in the outer office. And poor Bob with the troubles he has at home. Your uncle should be ashamed of what he pays him, of how he himself lives . . .”
“But, after all,” said her father the greengrocer, “it is a free market, and he pays what the trade will bear.”
“That’s wrong too,” said the young wife, hands on hips. “How the workingmen are to better themselves if their wages are so low they have to put their children working at such early ages is beyond me. How are they to make ends meet? How are they to advance themselves if there are no better wages in the future, perhaps even lower ones, and they can’t live decently now?”
“The Tories won’t be happy if women such as yourself get the suffrage,” said her father with a laugh. “Neither would anyone on the board of directors of a motive-power company!”
“If I did not love you as a father,” said the young wife, “I should be very cross with you.”
“Come, come,” said her husband the nephew. “It’s Christmas Day. Where’s your charity?”
“Where’s your uncle’s?”
“He does as the world wills,” said the nephew.
“Only more so,” said another guest, and they all laughed, the young wife included.
“Well, I invited him,” said Mizer’s nephew. “It’s up to him to come or no. I should welcome him with all the gladness of the season.”
“As would I,” said his wife. “Only you might as well wish for Christian charity to be carried on every day, in every way, throughout the year, in every nation on Earth!”
“Why show me this?” asked Eben Mizer of the Spirit. “No love is lost betwixt my nephew’s wife and myself. My nephew means very well, but he does not grasp the full principles of business to his bosom. He has done well enough; he could do much better.”
“Come,” said the Spirit of Christmases Current, grabbing Mizer’s hand in its unseen own. There was another crackle of blue lightning, and they were away, up a nail, across the roof, down the gutter pipe and off into the day.
* * *
After this reading, Dickens had two more in the provinces, then back to St. James Hall in London for the holiday series. He would read not only The Christmas Garland there, but also both The Chimes and The Haunted Man, his last Christmas book from back in 1848.
In London he would also oversee the Christmas supplement of Household Words, his weekly magazine. This year, on a theme superintended by Dickens, and including one short story by him, was the conceit of Christmas at Mugby junction, a station where five railway lines converged. Leaning over the junction would be the bright blue towers of the H.M.P.S., from which the trains drew their force. Wilkie Collins’s contribution was the story of a boy, back i
n London, who proudly wore the crisp blue and red uniform imagining, as he sat on duty with his headset strapped on, Mugby Junction and the great rail lines that he powered, on one of which was coming to London, and to whom he would be introduced on his fortnight off duty, his brother-in-law’s cousin, a girl. Dickens had, of course, made Collins rewrite all the precious parts, and bring Father Christmas in for a scratch behind the ears—“else it might as well take place during August Bank Holiday!” said Dickens in a terse note to Collins when the manuscript had caught up with him at his hotel in Aberdeen yesterday.
Just now, the letter opener in his hand had become the cane of old Mr. Jayhew as he walked toward the Cratchitts’ door.
* * *
Such a smell, like a bakery and a laundry and a pub all rolled together! The very air was thick with Christmas, so much so that Eben Mizer wondered how he detected the smells, unseen and unheard as he was, as the sputtering blue and purple Spirit stood beside him.
“Where’s your father?” asked Mrs. Cratchitt.
“He’s just gone to fetch Giant Timmy,” said the youngest daughter.
“Your brother’s name is Tim,” said Mrs. Cratchitt. “It’s just the neighbors call him that,” she added with a smile.
The door came open without a knock, and there stood Katy, their eldest, laden with baskets and a case, come all the way from Cambridge, where she worked as a nanny.
“Mother!” she said. “Oh, the changes on the trains! I thought I should never reach here!”
“Well,” said Mrs. Cratchitt, hugging her, “you’re here, that’s what matters. Now it will be a very merry Christmas!”
“I must have waited in ten stations,” said Katy, taking off her shawl, then hugging her sisters and giving them small presents. “Every line its own train, every one with its own motive-car. Absolutely nothing works right on Christmas Eve!” She looked around. “Where’s father? Where’s Tim?”
“Your father’s off fetching him . . . and his pay,” said Mrs. Cratchitt.
“When can I go to work, mumsy?” asked Bobby, pulling at his pinafore.
“Not for a long time yet,” said Mrs. Cratchitt. “Perhaps you’ll be the first one in the family goes to University.”
“Don’t tease him so,” said Katy.
“Well, it’s possible,” said his mother.
“Not with what Mr. Mizer pays father, and what I can send when I can, nor even with Tim’s pay,” said Katy. “And unless I am mistaken, his rates have gone down.”
“All of them are down,” said Mrs. Cratchitt, “what with the Irish and the potato blight. The streets here are full of red hair and beards, all looking for work.”
There was a sound outside in the street, and the door came open, Mr. Cratchitt’s back appearing as he turned. “This way. No, no, this way.” He tugged twice, and then was followed.
Behind Mr. Cratchitt came Tim. He weighed fifteen stone though he was but twelve years old. He wore a white shapeless smock, with the name Wilborn Mot. Ser. written in smudged ink across the left chest, and white pants. His skin was translucent, as if made of waxed parchment, and his head had taken on a slight pearlike appearance, not helped by the short bowl-shape into which his hair had been cut. There were two round notches in the bowl-cut, just above the temples, and small bruised and slightly burnt circles covered the exposed skin there.
But it was the eyes Mizer noticed most—the eyes, once blue-green like his father’s, had faded to whitish grey; they seemed both starting from their sockets in amazement, and to be taking in absolutely nothing, as if they were white china doorknobs stuck below his brows.
“Tim!” yelled Katy. She ran to him and hugged him as best she could. He slowly lifted one of his arms to wrap around her shoulders.
“Oh! You’re hurting!” she said, and pulled away.
“Here, sit here, Tim,” said Bob Cratchitt, making motions towards the largest chair. It groaned as the boy sat down.
“There is a small bonus for Christmas,” said Mr. Cratchitt. “Not much.” He patted the corner of the pay envelope in his pocket. “Not enough to equal even the old pay rates, but something. They’ve been working especially hard. The paymaster at Wilborn’s was telling me they’ve been hired as motive power for six new factories in the last month alone.”
“Oh, Tim,” said Katy. “It’s so good to see you and have you home for Christmas, even for just the day.”
He looked at her for a long time, then went back to watching the fireplace.
Then there was the steaming sound of a goose coming out of the oven, hissing in its own gravy, and of a pudding going in, and Mr. Cratchitt leapt up and started the gin-and-apple punch, with its pieces of pineapple, and oranges, and a full stick of cinnamon bark.
Halfway through the meal, when healths were going round, and Mr. Mizer’s name mentioned, and the Queen’s, Giant Timmy sat forward suddenly in the big chair that had been pulled up to the table, and said, “God Bless . . . us all each . . . every . . .” Then he went quiet again, staring at his glass.
“That’s right, that’s exactly right, Tim,” said Bob Cratchitt. “God Bless Us All, Each and Every One!”
Then the Spirit and Eben Mizer were outside in the snow, looking in at the window.
“I have nothing to do with this,” said Eben. “I pay Cratchitt as good as he could get, and I have nothing to do, whatsoever, with the policies of the companies for whom I do the accounts.” He looked at the Spirit of Christmases Current, who said nothing, and in a trice, he was back in his bedchamber, and the blue-purple glow was fading from the air. Exhausted as if he had swum ten miles off Blackpool, he dropped to unconsciousness against his stiff pillow.
* * *
Dickens grew rapidly tired as he read, but he dared not now let down either himself or his audience.
In many ways that younger self who had written the story had been a dreamer, but he had been also a very practical man in business and social matters. That night in Manchester as he waited for Mr. Disraeli to wind down, and as the idea for The Christmas Garland ran through his head, he thought he had seen a glimpse of a simple social need, and with all the assurance and arrogance of youth, what needed to be done. If he could strike the hammer blow with a Christmas tale, so much the better.
So he had.
* * *
The Spirit of Christmases Yet to Come was a small implike person, jumping here and there. It wore no mica or copper, only a tight garment and a small cloth skullcap from which stood up only a single wire, slightly glowing at the tip. First the Spirit was behind the chair, then in front, then above the bureau, then at one corner of the bed.
Despite its somewhat comic manner, the Spirit frightened Eben Mizer as the others had not. He drew back, afraid, for the face below the cap was an upturned grin, whether from mirth or in a rictus of pain he did not know. The imp said nothing but held out a gutta-percha covered wand for Mizer to grasp, as if it knew the very touch of its nervous hand would cause instant death, of the kind Mizer had feared from the Spirit before. Mizer took the end of the wand; instantly they were on the ceiling, then out in the hall, back near the chair, then inside something dark, then out into the night.
“I know you are to show me the Christmas Yet to Come, as Marley said. But is it Christmas as it Will Be, or only Christmas Yet to Come if I keep on this way?”
The imp was silent. They were in the air near the Serpentine, then somewhere off Margate, then back at the confluence of the Thames and Isis, then somewhere over the river near the docks. As Eben Mizer looked down, a slow barge transformed into a sleek boat going an unimaginable speed across the water. As he watched, it went in a long fast circle and crashed into a wharf, spewing bodies like toy soldiers from a bumped table.
He looked out towards the city. London towered up and up and up, till the highest buildings were level with his place in the middle of the air. And above the highest buildings stood giant towers of every kind and shape, humming and glowing blue in the air. Between the tall
stone and iron buildings ran aerial railways, level after crossing level of them, and on every one some kind of train; some sleek, some boxlike, moving along their spans. The city was a blaze of light; every corner on every street glowed, all the buildings were lit. Far to the horizon the lights stretched, past all comprehension; lights in a million houses, more lights than all the candles and lamps and new motility-lights in Eben Mizer’s world could make if all lit at once. There was no end to the glow—the whole river valley was one blue sheen that hurt his eyes.
Here and there, though, the blue flickered. As he watched, some trains gathered speed on their rails three hundred feet above the ground, and on others higher or lower they stopped completely. Then he and the imp were closer to one of the trains that had come to a halt. The passengers were pressed to the windows of one of the carriages, which had no engines or motive-cars attached, and then in a flash around a building came a spotted snake of light that was another train, and there was a great grinding roar as the two became one. The trains were a wilted salad of metal and wheels, and people flew by like hornet larvae from a nest hit by a shotgun blast. They tumbled without sound down the crevasses between the buildings, and cracked windows and masonry followed them as rails snapped like stretched string.
Something was wrong with the sky, for the blue light flickered on and off, as did the lights of the city, and the top of one of the towers began to glow faint red, as if it were a mulling poker.
Then he and the imp were on the ground, near a churchyard, and as they watched, with a grinding clang that died instantly, a train car from above went through the belfry of the church. Bodies, whose screams grew higher and louder, thudded into the sacred ground, snapping off tombstones, giving statues a clothing of true human skin.
The imp of Christmases Yet to Come drew nearer a wooden cross in the pauper’s section, pointing. Eben Mizer stood transfixed, watching the towers of buildings, stone attached to iron, and the twisting cords of the railways above come loose and dangle before breaking off and falling.
A Yuletide Universe Page 18