Once upon a time of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve old Scrooge sat busy in his wool-house going over his stash. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the courtyard outside, gloveless, scarfless, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and sockless, stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them.
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the sweaterstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, purling, cabling, gauge getting old crank.
"Christmas! Bah, Humbug! A poor excuse for felting a man's socks every 25th of December. Are there no polypropylene fleeces?"
"Humbug!" said Scrooge again; and walked across the room.
After several turns, he sat down. As he threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened to rest upon a skein and a disused swift that balanced in the work basket, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten with a sleeve. It was with great astonishment, and with a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he saw this swift begin to unwind.
It swung so softly in the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it spun wildly, and so did every ball of yarn in the house.
This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute, but it seemed an hour. The balls ceased as they had begun, together.
A clanking noise came, deep down below; as if some person were dragging a heavy stash bin in the cellar. The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound, and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight towards his work basket.
"humbug still!" said Scrooge. " I wont believe it."
His colour changed though, when, without a pause, It came on through one set of unfinished sleeves, and passed into the room before his eyes.
The same WIP: the very same. The same fronts, the usual collar, button band and ends to be woven in.
"How now!" said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever. "What do you want with me?"
"What do you want with me?"
"Much!” said the WIP's voice, no doubt about it.
"Who are you?"
"Ask me who I was."
" You don't believe in me," observed the WIP."
"I don't," said Scrooge.
"What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of your senses?"
"I don't know," said Scrooge.
"Why do you doubt your senses?"
"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them. A slight disorder of the gauge makes them cheats. You may be an unwound bit of romney, a ball of angora, a crumb of thrums, a fragment of an undertwisted ply. There's more of (sl1, k2, psso)* than of passed over about you, whatever you are!"
"Do you believe in me or not"
"I do," quaked Scrooge. "I must. But why do WIPs walk the earth, and why do they come to me?"
"Hear me!" cried the WIP. "My time is nearly gone."
The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they went. Every one of them wore cast ons like Scrooge's WIP; none were finished.
Was it a dream or not?
The hour bell sounded, which it did with a deep, dull, hollow, melancholy One.
The curtains of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the unearthly visitor who drew them:
"Are you the Sock, sir, whose coming was foretold to me?" asked Scrooge.
"I am!"
The voice was soft and gentle. Singularly low, as if instead of being so close beside him, it were at a distance.
"Who, and what are you?" Scrooge demanded.
"I am the Spirit of Socks Past."
"Long Past?" inquired Scrooge: observant of its dwarfish stature.
"No. Your past. Rise! and walk with me!"
All he could make out was, that it was still very foggy and extremely cold, and that there was no noise of people running to and fro, and making a great stir, as there unquestionably would have been if night had beaten off bright day, and taken possession of the world.
"These are but shadows of the things that have been," said the Sock. "They have no consciousness of us."
They went in. At sight of an old gentleman spinning Blue Faced Leicester, sitting behind such a high wheel, that if it had been two inches taller he must have knocked his distaff against the ceiling,
Scrooge cried in great excitement: "Why, it's old Fezziwig! Bless his heart; it's Fezziwig alive again!"
"Yo ho, my boys!" said Fezziwig. "No more work to-night. Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer! Let's have the spindles up," cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap of his hands, "before a man can say Jack Robinson!"
Then old Fezziwig stood out to Knit-a-long with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them; three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were not to be trifled with; people who would knit, and had no notion of tatting.
The noise in this room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more knitters there, than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind could count; and they were not forty knitters conducting themselves like one, but every knitter was conducting itself like forty. Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves on being acquainted with a pattern or two, and being usually equal to the time-of-day, express the wide range of their capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for anything from cable-and-bobble to manslaughter; between which opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and comprehensive range of subjects.
Without venturing for Scrooge quite as hardily as this, I don't mind calling on you to believe that he was ready for a good broad field of strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.
Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by any means prepared for nothing; and, consequently, when the Bell struck One, and no shape appeared, he was taken with a violent fit of trembling. Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter of an hour went by, yet nothing came. All this time, he lay upon his bed, the very core and centre of a blaze of ruddy light, which streamed upon it when the clock proclaimed the hour; and which, being only light, was more alarming than a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it meant, or would be at; and was sometimes apprehensive that he might be at that very moment an interesting case of spontaneous combustion, without having the consolation of knowing it.
At last, however, he began to think as you or I would have thought at first; for it is always the person not in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done in it, and would unquestionably have done it too. At last, I say, he began to think that the source and secret of this ghostly light might be in the adjoining room, from whence, on further tracing it, it seemed to shine. This idea taking full possession of his mind, he got up softly and shuffled in his slippers to the door.
The moment Scrooge's hand was on the lock, a strange voice called him by his name, and bade him enter. He obeyed.
It was his own room. There was no doubt about that. But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a perfect grove; from every part of which, bright gleaming berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring up the chimney, as that dull petrification of a hearth had never known in Scrooge's time, or Marley's, or for many and many a winter season gone. Heaped up on the floor, to form a kind of throne, were skeins, rovings, batts, spindles, center pull balls, nostepindes, fleeces, handpaints,merinos, polwarths, guanacos, vicuna, coopwporth, qiviut, addi-turbos, and seething bowls of dye, that made the chamber dim with their many hued steam.
Scrooge entered timidly, and hung his head before this WIP.
There sat a jolly Giant, glorious to see; who was a glowing Garment.
"Come in!" exclaimed the Giant. "Come in! and know me better, man!"
"I am the Project of Christmas Present," said the Spirit. "Look upon me!"
Scrooge reverently did so. This garment hung so loosely on the needles. Its capacious back was finished, as if disdaining to be frogged or tinked. Girded round its middle was an antique circular, and the ancient stitch holder was eaten up with rust.
The Ghost of Projects Present rose.
"Spirit," said Scrooge submissively, "conduct me where you will. I went forth last night on compulsion, and I learnt a lesson which is working now. To-night, if you have aught to teach me, let me profit by it.
"Touch my ribbing!
The local wool shop!
There were great, round, pot-bellied baskets of balls of yarns, shaped like the waistcoats of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Merinos, shining in the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were polwarths and alpacas, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there were bunches of Angora, made, in the shopkeeper's benevolence to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might water gratis as they passed; there were piles of fibers, mossy and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered leaves; there were North Ronaldsey, squat and swarthy, setting off the Romeldale and Shetland, and, in the great compactness of their wooly persons, urgently entreating and beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and cast on after dinner.
It was not alone that the scales descending on the counter made a merry sound, or that the neps and needles kept company so briskly, or that the skeins were rattled up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even that the doublepoints were so plentiful and rare, the Cormos so extremely white, the needles of rosewood so long and straight, the cashmeres so delicious, the handpaints so caked and spotted with molten color as to make the coldest lookers-on feel faint and subsequently bilious.
And perhaps it was the pleasure the good Spirit had in showing off this power of his, or else it was his own kind, generous, hearty nature, and his sympathy with all poor men, that led him straight to Scrooge's clerk.
Little Bob, the father, with at least three feet of knitted comforter exclusive of the fringe.
"And how did little Tim cast on?" asked Mrs. Cratchit,
"Provisional and as good as gold," said Bob, "and better."
"Spirit," said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, "tell me if Tiny Tim will knit."
"Are there no polypropylene fleeces?"
Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.
"I see a vacant chair," replied the Ghost,
"in the poor chimney-corner, and needles without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race," returned the Ghost, "will find him with yarn.
But the whole scene passed off in a breath; and he and the Spirit were again upon their travels.
It was a long night, if it were only a night; but Scrooge had his doubts of this, because the Christmas Holidays appeared to be condensed into the space of time they passed together. It was strange, too, that while Scrooge remained unaltered in his outward form, the Project grew older, clearly older, nearly finished. Scrooge had observed this change, but never spoke of it, until they left a children's Twelfth Night party, when, looking at the WIP as they stood together in an open place, he noticed that it was grey.
"Are WIP's lives so short?" asked Scrooge.
"My life upon this globe, is very brief," replied the Ghost. "It ends to-night."
"To-night!" cried Scrooge.
"To-night at midnight. Hark! The time is drawing near.
The chimes were ringing the three quarters past eleven at that moment.
"Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask," said Scrooge, looking intently at the WIP's pockets, "but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your pockets. Is it a sock or a glove?"
"It might be a mitt, for all the stitches there are upon it," was the Spirit's sorrowful reply. "Look here."
From the foldings of its pockets, it brought two mittens; wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They fell down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of the garment.
"Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!" exclaimed the Ghost.
They were yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where cables might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of fair isle in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
"Project! are these mittens yours?" Scrooge could say no more.
"They are Man's," said the Garment, looking down upon them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This right is Ignorance. This left is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this right, for on it's thumb I see that written which is Doom, unless the knitting be done.
The bell struck twelve.
Scrooge looked about him for the Spirit, and saw it not. As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, he remembered the prediction of the old merino, and lifting up his eyes, beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like a mist along the ground, towards him.
The Phantom slowly, gravely, silently, approached. When it came near him, Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in the very air through which this Spirit moved it seemed to scatter gloom and mystery.
It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible save one outstretched straight needle from which hung a beginning, but only just. But for this it would have been difficult to detach its figure from the night, and separate it from the darkness by which it was surrounded.
He felt that it was tall and stately when it came beside him, and that its mysterious presence filled him with a solemn dread. He knew no more, for the Spirit neither spoke nor moved.
"I am in the presence of the Ghost of Sweaters Yet To Be?" said Scrooge.
The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its needle.
"You are about to show me shadows of the projects that have not happened, but will happen in the time before us," Scrooge pursued. "Is that so, Spirit?
"Ghost of the Future!" he exclaimed, "I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose is to do me good, Will you not speak to me?"
It gave him no reply. The needle in its hand was pointed straight before them.
They scarcely seemed to enter the city; for the city rather seemed to spring up about them, and encompass them of its own act. But there they were, in the heart of it; on 'Change, amongst the wool merchants; who hurried up and down, and chinked the markers in their pockets, and conversed in groups, and looked at their gauges, and trifled thoughtfully with their great old fleeces; and so forth, as Scrooge had seen them often.
The Spirit stopped beside one little knot of business men. Observing that the needle was pointed to them, Scrooge advanced to listen to their talk.
"No," said a great fat man with a monstrous chin, "I don't know much about it, either way. I only know he's Cast Off."
"When did he Cast Off?" inquired another.
"Last night, I believe."
"Why, was he finished?" asked a third, taking a vast quantity of qiviut out of a very large qiviut-box.
"I thought he'd never finish."
"God knows," said the first, with a yawn.
"What has he done with his yarn?" asked a red-faced gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his needles, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock but was in fact a red scarf.
"I haven't heard," said the man with the large chin, yawning again. "Left it to his company, perhaps. He hasn't left it to me. That's all I know."
The Spirit of Sweaters Yet To Be conveyed him, as before though at a different time, he thought: indeed, there seemed no order in these latter visions, save that they were in the Future, into the resorts of SOAR, but showed him not himself. Indeed, the Spirit did not stay for anything, but went straight on, as to the end just now desired, until besought by Scrooge to tarry for a moment.
"Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point," said Scrooge, "answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the Sweaters That Will Be, or are they shadows of Sweaters That May Be, only?"
Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which it stood.
"Knitter's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the courses be departed from, the ends will be woven in. Say it is thus with what you show me!"
The Spirit was immovable as ever.
Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and following the needle, read upon the stone of the neglected grave his own - Discarded Stash.
Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have this fate reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom's hood and dress. It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down onto a pair of size 9 birch straights.
Yes! the needles were his own. The ball winder was his own, the swift was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time before him was his own, to make amends mittens in!
"I will knit in the Past, the Present, and the Future!" Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. "The WIP of all Three shall strive within me."
"I don't know what to do!" cried Scrooge, laughing and crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoon
of himself turning the heels of stockings.
"I am as light as a mohair, I am as happy as an angora, I am as merry as a 2 ply. I am as giddy as a lace pattern. A merry Christmas to everybody! A happy New Year to all the world. Hallo here! Whoop! Hallo!"
"There're the magic loop socks!" cried Scrooge, starting off again, and going round the fireplace.
"There's the sleeve, by which the Spirit of WIP entered! There's the basket where the Ghost of Projects Present, sat! There's the window where I saw the wandering Sweaters! It's all right, it's all true, it all happened. Ha ha ha!"
Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold; cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight; Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious! Glorious!
"What's to-day!" cried Scrooge, calling downward to a boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to look about him.
"Eh?" returned the boy, with all his might of wonder.
"What's to-day, my fine fellow?" said Scrooge.
"To-day!" replied the boy. "Why, Christmas Day."
"It's Christmas Day!" said Scrooge to himself. "I haven't missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night. They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of course they can. Hallo, my fine fellow!"
"Hallo!" returned the boy.
"Do you know the local yarn store, in the next street but one, at the corner?" Scrooge inquired.
"I should hope I did," replied the lad.
"An intelligent boy!" said Scrooge. "A remarkable boy! Do you know whether they've sold the lace weight hand paint skein that was hanging up there? Not the little angora: the big cashmere one?"
"What, the skein as big as me?" returned the boy.
"What a delightful boy!" said Scrooge. "It's a pleasure to talk to him. Yes, my buck!"
"It's hanging there now," replied the boy.
"Is it?" said Scrooge. "Go and buy it."
"Barbara Walk-er!" exclaimed the boy.
"No, no," said Scrooge, "I am in earnest. Go and buy it, and tell 'em to bring it here. Come back with the man, and I'll give you a scarf. Come back with him in less than five minutes and I'll give you hat-and-mittens!"
Scrooge was better than his word. He knit it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did learn to knit - and to crochet, he was a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him, but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was quite enough for him.
He had no further intercourse with UFO's, but lived upon the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards working from his stash; and it was always said of him, that he knew how to knit well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, Bless our Cast ons, Every One!
