Scrooge and Marley

Marley was alive, and therein lay the problem. None of their fellow clerks, those ‘Damned Souls’, could have upset Scrooge’s life as Marley was about to do.

The trouble began with a whistle. Marley was an accomplished whistler. With two fingers in his mouth, he could let off a blast whose volume lifted roof tiles and commanded the immediate respect of every urchin in the borough. Or he could sit and deliver a sprightly waltz as if playing on a piccolo, with verve and glissando fit to enrapture the most critical of dancers. The whistle of which I speak was of neither character, however; it was a low, swooping note, a sound which by the common tradition of the city streets is indicative of disbelief.

Scrooge reluctantly withdrew his attention from the accounts of Fegg’s Metropolitan Dairy and looked at Marley, whose right hand was just in the act of raising his spectacles, yet again, to his forehead.

“What’s amiss with Modge?” asked Marley. Feeling neither qualified nor inclined to supply information on this point, Scrooge remained silent.

This discouraging reception caused Marley to turn to the clerk on his right instead.

“What do you make of this, Tommy?” asked Marley, genially. Little Tom Ponson looked as frightened as a mouse singled out by an owl; he swallowed nervously, and if a safe hole had only been at hand, he would surely have scurried into it.

“Make of what, Jacob?” he asked.

“These figures from Mr Modge the hatter?”

Ponson knew no more than Scrooge, but he obligingly shuffled off his stool and looked over Marley’s shoulder. He scanned the pages with a fearful expression, glancing back at the security of his own desk.

“Is there a mistake? I don’t see it,” he said.

“No, no, there’s no mistake in the accounts,” said Marley, as if a concern with errors were at once the most frivolously light-minded and the most tedious of personal traits.

“Then honestly, Jacob, I don’t see… excuse me,” said Ponson nervously and scuttled back to his seat.

“How can it be? Ebenezer, have you seen what Modge charges for hats?” said Marley.

“I have not,” said Scrooge, and having said all he cared to, he lowered his eyes again.

“Have a look at this, then, won’t you, and tell me what you make of it.”

“You are not going to draw me in again,” said Scrooge firmly.

“Of course not, old fellow! But I need the help of your brain to penetrate this enigma.” And Marley smiled at his fellow clerk with a beguiling liveliness.

In Tickflint’s counting-house, signs of real vitality were as unexpected and received as little encouragement as in the great desert of Egypt. The clerks who laboured there were for the most part as dry and silent as any of the great Pharaoh’s carefully wrapped scribes. It was Marley himself, of course, who had privately given the others the name of the Damned Souls. Scrooge recognised the aptness of the description, though when Marley first applied it he had deprecated its discourtesy.

“Well, I don’t see much life in ’em, my boy,” Marley had said, “and don’t they frown and wince as if this were Purgatory? The difficulty is imagining what sins such feeble fellows could possibly have committed to land ’em in such a place. Limbo might be more the mark, I should say.”

Scrooge, to tell the truth, was not notably ebullient himself. He was a young man of the rational kind that prefers the regular canal to the wild cataract. He would not have been pleased to hear that his life was about to be diverted from its established path and channelled down foaming falls through his colleague’s intervention. Persistent readers of this account may ultimately judge for themselves whether Jacob Marley played the role of a beneficent friend in Scrooge’s life or simply carried him off to his doom like a mischievous imp. Still, to come back to my starting point, I will happily swear an affidavit any day of the week to the simple fact of Marley’s liveliness. He fairly fizzed with animal spirits. The bright red weskit and old brown coat he wore, as though he were a jolly robin among the black-coated rooks of the counting house, proclaimed his zest no less than the jovial smile on his broad features, spectacles thrust ever and again up on to his forehead as though the need to examine the figures in the ledger before him were an obligation of no real moment. Marley was a few years older than the other clerks and there was an air about him of having once lived a different, more colourful life, instead of progressing directly from schoolbooks to account books. The old-fashioned pigtail he wore, like the tassels on his boots, announced a fellow with an adventurous side to his nature that sat uneasily in the counting house.

There were twelve desks in Tickflint’s main office, a low-ceilinged room with worn floorboards and three dusty windows that let in the weary light from the street. All the long day the young men laboured there. Fellows in the prime of their youth; but they neither hunted, nor wooed, nor quested nor built, but let the year slowly pass them by while they sat on high stools writing up the account books of a hundred different enterprises. Enough gold flowed through that cramped room, in inky representation, to defray the expenses of a couple of princes; but woe to all if a penny should be unaccounted for at the end of the day! Then the doors were locked until the matter was resolved. Scrooge, it may be acknowledged, was the best of them when it came to chasing down the little errors that had to be corrected before old Tickflint would allow anyone to leave. Scrooge could smell a misplaced farthing in a pile of books on the other side of the room.

Scrooge sighed. Molkins, one of the damnedest of the Souls, glanced back at them over his shoulder, eyebrows raised. Now Scrooge did not wish to encourage Marley, but still less was he about to be cowed by a look from Molkins, so reluctantly he got down from his stool and leafed quickly through the ledger in front of Marley.

“Well, these hats appear cheap for the quality I grant you,” he conceded, slipping one hand thoughtfully into his pocket. “Very cheap. Yet sales are slow and getting slower. In plain terms, the business is failing.”

“I think his turnover should be double what it is,” said Marley, “but you’re the computer among us, the rapid calculator. What do you say?”

Scrooge’s attention was snared by this challenge. To you and me, and even to Jacob Marley, the figures in an account book do not sing. To Scrooge, however, they were Sibyls, priestesses whose gnomic utterances told of the past, the present fortunes of men, and even the fated future. He could listen raptly to their revelations, even when they spoke of nothing more elevated than the commerce of a hat shop off Drury Lane.

He mentally converted Modge’s hats into a standard average hat, considering clearance prices in the imaginary market for average hats and potential volumes given perfect information and rational Benthamite purchasers, ones, that is to say, who consistently sought maximum utility from their headgear. Not that anyone who has seen Jeremy Bentham’s preserved body displayed in the corridors of University College in Gower Street, sporting a magnificent wide-brimmed chapeau, could suppose that he himself, the grand originator of the philosophy of utilitarianism, ever purchased so prosaic a thing as an average hat.

“This is an economically contingent matter,” said Scrooge, grandly, “but I should estimate that somewhere between quadruple and quintuple current turnover would be a justifiable expectation, even at prices nearer the going rate. The enterprise might be made handsomely profitable, one would foresee.” He did some further mental calculations and leafed back through the ledger. “There’s been something badly wrong since the beginning of the current year, a definite adverse turn in the fortunes of the shop. Something that transformed a slow, poorly managed business into one that was actually failing. But whatever it was, it’s no concern of mine.”

“Justly remarked, Mr Scrooge,” said a sharp voice at the front of the room. Old Hiram Tickflint himself had come in; a thin man with a pointed nose and eyes like little crumbs of jet set deep in wrinkles of flesh; he wore an ancient wig and a suit which could scarcely have been much newer than the hairpiece, judging by the ink stains and shiny patches upon it.

Scrooge himself was smartly if simply turned out. He regarded it as part of his profession to be dressed as plainly and correctly as he wished his columns of figures to be; the exact adjustment of his mulberry cravat quietly announced the equal propriety of his calculations. Yet he understood and appreciated Tickflint’s shabbiness. The old man was a true utilitarian; he made his clothes serve him until the very last threads gave way, yielding every tiny fraction of their value. It might not be a good advertisement, but it was good economy, and what did Tickflint care about advertising himself? He had plenty of clients, and no woman need be tempted to apply for the position of his wife, left vacant by the demise of poor suffering Mrs Tickflint seven years earlier. Tickflint was done with matrimony as he was done with all unnecessary expense.

He stalked between the desks like a bedraggled heron after fish in a pond; the Souls averted their eyes and Molkins’s pen began to move so fast he made a blot and sanded it furiously to cover his embarrassment.

“The accounts of Modge are indeed no business of yours,” said Tickflint. “Is Marley in need of your help?”

“He solicited my attention,” said Scrooge. “Repeatedly.”

“Is that so, Mr Marley?” asked Tickflint, fixing him with one eye. “Did you interrupt Scrooge at his work? With what purpose?”

“If you will glance at these accounts, Sir,” said Marley, not a whit abashed, “you will see that they spell out one thing for Modge: failure. If matters continue as they are, his collapse inside a twelvemonth is assured. Yet we know that his hats are among the best in London and his prices are low. Why should he be in such difficulty?”

“Please resume your work, Scrooge,” said Tickflint, “your assistance is not required here. I’ll ask you once more, Marley: what do you think you are you doing?”

“I am attempting diagnosis, Mr Tickflint,” said Marley, hitting the ledger a blow with the flat of his hand as if forestalling an interruption from the recalcitrant volume. “You see, Sir, we here, with our vantage point and unmatched experience, we have the power to identify the disorders afflicting these businesses, and prescribe remedies; to become as it were, the consultant doctors of economic enterprise…”

“That will do, Mr Marley!” said Tickflint, “You are no doctor, but a clerk in my office. Although to speak plainly, this erratic behaviour causes me to doubt whether you ought to retain that station very much longer.”

“But if I might ask you to grant me just a moment’s consideration, Mr Tickflint?” said Marley, who seemed completely unaffected by this warning, “If Mr Modge goes out of business, we shall lose a valuable client. If we suggest to him an effective remedy for the disorder which is afflicting his hat shop, he may use our services to our mutual benefit for many years to come…”

“Modge is incapacitated, a broken reed,” said Tickflint, dismissing the hatter with a chopping gesture. “To advise him would be useless, even if you had any worthwhile advice to offer. Mr Marley, please resume your work in silence for the remainder of the day. I shall have your wages made up, Sir; I’ll require you not to return tomorrow or at any future time.”

With that, he stalked from the room.

As soon as it was clear that he had really gone, most of the Souls turned in their seats. Only Scraven went on working as if he were indifferent. Little Tom Ponson, a gentler Soul indeed than the others, looked concerned; on the other faces – and this included Scrooge’s – Marley, had he chosen to look, would have seen nothing but incredulity and reproach.

“What did you expect him to do, you fool?” asked Scrooge. “He doesn’t pay you to sit there amusing yourself by playing at doctors.” He puckered up his mouth. “Look, Marley, sit down and see if you can’t get a reputable measure of work done. Then at the end of the day, go and grovel as best you can. Throw yourself on his mercy. Eat dirt, I say. He’ll take you back if you apologise properly – properly, mind! He’s hard, but he’s a man of business, not a tyrant.”

“Damned if I do,” said Marley, with a belligerent light in his eye. “I’ll suffer the old fool no more. Do you think it’s true about Modge? That he’s – what was it? A broken reed, I mean?”

“It’s no concern of mine,” repeated Scrooge, “Hatters may fail, say I, so long as they do it without troubling me. I don’t know the man from Adam. His ruin or his rescue are nothing to me beyond a means of filling these books with figures.” He paused and let out his breath. “Come now, Jacob,” he added, “be reasonable! Show patience, I beg you.”

“Damned if I will,” said Marley, but he sat down, and for the rest of the day he scribbled away faster than Scrooge could ever remember him doing. The scratching sound of work being accomplished was soothing to Scrooge. He liked it in a general way, but he also liked what it said about Marley settling at last to a sensible course. He was, in fact, far from sure that Tickflint would be willing to retain Marley, however grovelling the apology. If Scrooge imagined himself in Tickflint’s shoes, as in fact he often did, worn down and leaky though that ancient footwear was, he thought he would certainly choose to employ a more pliable and subordinate clerk, one with no more than half Marley’s curiosity and at least twice his application. There were many available.

Scrooge, by contrast, felt himself secure on his stool, in spite of the annoying way Marley had again drawn him into misbehaviour right under their employer’s nose. He was surely the most useful clerk Tickflint had: sharp, neat, and meticulous. He believed that so far as a certain cold absence of disapproval could be construed as favour, Tickflint thought well of him. Moreover, though he would not exactly have said that for his part he liked Tickflint, he felt that he understood him. He believed he saw into Tickflint’s mind better and more sympathetically than any of the Damned Souls (those mere ciphers) could manage, and of course incomparably better than the mercurial Marley did. Scrooge, in short, felt in harmony with his employer.

At the end of the day Scrooge found to his astonishment that Marley was silently busy trying to hide a great sheaf of paper inside the back of his tights. Luckily no-one but Scrooge was watching as he quietly writhed around and stretched his arms in the attempt to get both hands under his coat-tails. This was so like some scenes Scrooge had witnessed as a schoolboy that for several moments he supposed that Marley was using the sheaf of paper to fortify his rear against a caning. Then he asked himself whether perhaps Marley had gone mad? He had only got as far as the brink of deciding to put the same question explicitly to Marley himself when the putative madman lowered his coat and hurried off to the cubicle in the next room where Tickflint spent most of his time. Scrooge hesitated, but curiosity got the better of him; he went to the doorway to watch, as though he could see through the walls of Tickflint’s cabinet.

Marley emerged not more than two minutes later. Catching Scrooge’s eye, he waved cheerfully as if nothing were amiss and disappeared into the street. Clearly, he had not apologised at all. Was that – could it be – the end of Marley? Scrooge discovered with some surprise that he would miss the annoying fellow quite badly, that although Marley’s absence would remove a host of irritations it would, overall, render life at Tickflint’s a good deal less supportable.