A Christmas Carol: The First of the Three Spirits
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I'm Keith Morrison, and this is episode two of A Christmas Carol. Old Ebenezer Scrooge has just had the fright of his life. He's been visited by the ghost of his old business partner, Jacob Marley. Miley tells Scrooge he's been roaming the earth since the very day of his death, haunted by his own story of stinginess and greed. He'd like to change it all, but it's too late now. And he warns Scrooge that he, too, is destined for a tortured afterlife if he doesn't mend his ways. As if all that isn't enough, the ghost of Marley announces that Scrooge will be visited again by three more ghosts, beginning when the clock strikes one. We pick up our story as Ebenezer wakes from a fitful sleep, confused, and, as Dickens writes, with one eye on the clock.
When Scrooge awoke, it was so dark that, looking out of bed, he could scarcely distinguish the transparent window from the opaque walls of his chamber. He was endeavoring to pierce the darkness with his ferret eyes when chimes of a neighboring church struck the four quarters. So he listened for the hour. To his great astonishment, the heavy bell went on from six to seven and from seven to eight, and regularly up to twelve, and then stopped. Twelve? It was past two when he went to bed. The clock was wrong. An icicle must have gotten into the works. Twelve? Why, it isn't possible, said Scrooge, that I can have slept through a whole day and far into another night. It isn't possible that anything has happened to the sun, and this is twelve at noon. The idea being an alarming one, he scrambled out of bed and groped his way to the window. He was obliged to rub the frost off with the sleeve of his dressing gown before he could see anything, and he could see very little then.
All he could make out was that it was still foggy and extremely cold, and that there was no noise of people running to and fro, as there unquestionably would have been if night had beaten off bright day and taken possession of the world. Scrooge went to bed again and thought and thought and thought it over and over and over and could make nothing of it. The more he thought, the more perplexed he was, and the more he endeavored not to think, the more he thought. Marley's ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved within himself after mature inquiry that it was all a dream, his mind flew back again like a strong spring released to its first position and presented the same problem to be worked all through. Was it a dream or not?
Scrooge lay in this state until the chime had gone three quarters more, when he remembered, on a sudden, that the ghost had warned him of a visitation when the bell tolled one. He resolved to lie awake until the hour was past. He was more than once convinced he must have sunk into a doze unconsciously and missed the clock, but at length it broke upon his listening ear. The hour itself, said Scrooge triumphantly, and nothing else. He spoke before the hour bell sounded, which now it did, with a deep, dull, hollow, melancholy one. Light flashed up in the room upon the instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his back, but those to which his face was addressed.
The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, and Scrooge found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them. It was a strange figure, like a child, yet not so like a child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural medium which gave him the appearance of having receded from the view and being... diminished to a child's proportions. Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was white as if with age, and yet the face had not a wrinkle in it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were very long and muscular, the hands the same, as if its hold were of uncommon strength. It wore a tunic of the purest white, and round its waist was bound a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was beautiful.
It held a branch of fresh green holly in its hand, and had its dress trimmed with summer flowers. But the strangest thing about it was that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright, clear jet of light. Even this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with increasing steadiness, was not its strangest quality.
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