Mystery for Christmas and Other Stories

And there he was indeed, peering over my left shoulder, bandage and all; apparently he had been there, unnoticed, the whole time. Now he grasped my left hand, and together the three of us passed through the bay window’s leaded panes. I felt the solid glass brush past me like the strips of a beaded curtain.

I had closed my eyes as I approached the window and did not open them at first when I felt the cold outside air. For one thing the air itself felt different, damp and chilly rather than sharp and crisp. And all about me was a confusion of noise and smells. So many smells: coal fires smoking, gas fumes, old fish, beer, sewage, sweat, and then rising above all this the sweet, pungent odor of mince pie. I stood for a moment in wonder, my head raised like that of a hound downwind of a herd of deer, just sniffing. Then I had the strange, vaguely unpleasant, sensation of someone passing through me, as if I were a beaded curtain, and I opened my eyes.

I knew at once where I was, for I had been there before, in the City of London late on a winter afternoon, at a busy intersection just east of those three brooding stone edifices that form the hub around which the ancient city spins: the Bank of England, the Mansion House, and the Royal Exchange. I marvelled at how similar the scene was to the one I had enjoyed in my student days, watching schools of office workers crowding down the old streets through the early twilight into underground and railway stations. And yet, as I recovered from the shock of finding myself in that well remembered spot, I saw it all as very familiar yet marvelously strange.

Leadenhall, that was the name of the street, between two churches, St. Michael Cornhill to the west, its stolid, rectangular, pinnacled tower standing out above everything, and to the east St. Andrew Undershaft, the site, it is said, in older times of a gigantic maypole. It is the churches, the ubiquitous churches, that give the City of London its illusion of timelessness. The London I now stood in was older, dirtier, noisier, and even more charming than the one I had known.

I am a city person, revelling in the urban rush and clutter and racket. But this was almost too much city for even me, noisy beyond belief, with the clatter of donkey carts and hackneys and great lumbering omnibuses over the stone paving, the shouts of peddlers urging their wares on the passerby, and the intermittent clanging of bells. I counted the chimes of the hour coming from St. Michael’s tower with some surprise. It was only three o’clock, yet it was dark enough for the gas lamps to be lighted. The air was thick with an oppressive dark green smog that penetrated everywhere but softened the roughness of the street life as if wrapping it in gray-green chiffon.

I was finding it difficult to see, a problem the natural inhabitants of the place seemed to have overcome, and blundered into a young woman who materialized suddenly out of the fog, hurrying along the street, a dark knit shawl wrapped around her striped silk gown, a wide-brimmed bonnet shielding her face. I got a look at it, though, a pretty, childlike, bright-eyed face set with a grimness that seemed contrary to its nature. I attempted to excuse myself, but realized, when the stack of petticoats rustled right through my astonished leg, that apologies were not just unnecessary, they were downright useless.

I fell in step beside her, curious about where she might be going and why she was so nervous. Invisibility, by the way, is a very useful attribute to have in a crowded city street, especially when trying to keep up with someone who is in a great hurry and doesn’t even know you’re there. I was enjoying myself thoroughly, drinking in the wonderful grimy aliveness of the city, feeling the rush and the gaiety, observing with delight the sideshow of strange and colorful characters free in their anonymity. I took pleasure now and then as I hurried through (literally) the crowds in playing childish “invisible man” games, swinging unseen from a lamppost and passing right through the polished brass “can” of a baked potato vendor stationed on the pavement in the shelter of Whittington Avenue as it leads into the old Leadenhall Market. I must have caused a bit of a breeze, for the coals in the iron firepot suspended beneath the large, showy receptacle shot up in a sudden surge of orange flame and died down. Then I remembered Marley and the superstition that flames rise in the presence of ghosts.

“Sorry about that,” I said over my shoulder but saw only the Ghost of Christmas Past helping the hot potato man get the conflagration under control before his primitive steam table blew up. Marley had hurried on ahead through the confusion of the great poultry market.

“Where are you going?” I shouted over the racket of hundreds of chickens, turkeys, geese, ducks, and, for all I know, dodos and emus, bewailing their fate in the overcrowded condemned cells of the market, a Dickensian slum for poultry if ever there was one. A group of three or four very dirty, ragged boys hoarsely chanting some tuneless carol passed through me, surrounding the potato vendor in an effort to take advantage of the generosity of his clients and the warmth of his fire.

“My chambers,” Marley panted, pointing vaguely toward the street ahead of us. “I lived there, and still do, in a way of speaking, in the wine cellars.”