“All the new people have left my shop. I cannot understand it. They seem
to object to me on such curious and inconsistent sort of grounds,
these scientific men, and these innovators. They say that I give people
superstitions and make them too visionary; they say I give people
sausages and make them too coarse. They say my heavenly parts are too
heavenly; they say my earthly parts are too earthly; I don’t know what
they want, I’m sure. How can heavenly things be too heavenly, or earthly
things too earthly? How can one be too good, or too jolly? I don’t
understand. But I understand one thing well enough. These modern people
are living and I am dead.”
“You may be dead,” I replied. “You ought to know. But as for what they
are doing, do not call it living.”
.....
A silence fell suddenly between us which I somehow expected to be
unbroken. But it had not fallen for more than a few seconds when, in the
utter stillness, I distinctly heard a very rapid step coming nearer and
nearer along the street. The next moment a figure flung itself into the
shop and stood framed in the doorway. He wore a large white hat tilted
back as if in impatience; he had tight black old-fashioned pantaloons,
a gaudy old-fashioned stock and waistcoat, and an old fantastic coat. He
had large, wide-open, luminous eyes like those of an arresting actor; he
had a pale, nervous face, and a fringe of beard. He took in the shop
and the old man in a look that seemed literally a flash and uttered the
exclamation of a man utterly staggered.
“Good lord!” he cried out; “it can’t be you! It isn’t you! I came to ask
where your grave was.”
“I’m not dead yet, Mr. Dickens,” said the old gentleman, with a feeble
smile; “but I’m dying,” he hastened to add reassuringly.
“But, dash it all, you were dying in my time,” said Mr. Charles Dickens
with animation; “and you don’t look a day older.”
“I’ve felt like this for a long time,” said Father Christmas.
Mr. Dickens turned his back and put his head out of the door into the
darkness.
“Dick,” he roared at the top of his voice; “he’s still alive.”
.....
Another shadow darkened the doorway, and a much larger and more
full-blooded gentleman in an enormous periwig came in, fanning his
flushed face with a military hat of the cut of Queen Anne. He carried
his head well back like a soldier, and his hot face had even a look
of arrogance, which was suddenly contradicted by his eyes, which were
literally as humble as a dog’s. His sword made a great clatter, as if
the shop were too small for it.
“Indeed,” said Sir Richard Steele, “?’tis a most prodigious matter,
for the man was dying when I wrote about Sir Roger de Coverley and his
Christmas Day.”
My senses were growing dimmer and the room darker. It seemed to be
filled with newcomers.
“It hath ever been understood,” said a burly man, who carried his head
humorously and obstinately a little on one side--I think he was Ben
Jonson--“It hath ever been understood, consule Jacobo, under our King
James and her late Majesty, that such good and hearty customs were
fallen sick, and like to pass from the world. This grey beard most
surely was no lustier when I knew him than now.”
And I also thought I heard a green-clad man, like Robin Hood, say in
some mixed Norman French, “But I saw the man dying.”
“I have felt like this a long time,” said Father Christmas, in his
feeble way again.
Mr. Charles Dickens suddenly leant across to him.
“Since when?” he asked. “Since you were born?”
“Yes,” said the old man, and sank shaking into a chair. “I have been
always dying.”
Mr. Dickens took off his hat with a flourish like a man calling a mob to
rise.
“I understand it now,” he cried, “you will never die.”