ONE dollar and
eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies.
Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable
man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of
parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be
Christmas.
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and
howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection
that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles
predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage
to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at
$8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had
that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.
In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and
an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also
appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name “Mr. James Dillingham
Young.”
The “Dillingham” had been flung to the breeze during a former period of
prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income
was shrunk to $20, though, they were thinking seriously of contracting to a
modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called “Jim” and greatly
hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.
Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She
stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in
a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with
which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for
months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn’t go far. Expenses had
been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only
$1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a
happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling—something just a little bit
near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.
There was a pier glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have
seen a pier glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by
observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a
fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the
art.
Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. Her eyes
were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within twenty
seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.
Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs
in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim’s gold watch that had been
his father’s and his grandfather’s. The other was Della’s hair. Had the queen
of
So now Della’s beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a
cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a
garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she
faltered for a minute and stood still while a tear or two splashed on the worn
red carpet.
On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of
skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the
door and down the stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign read: “Mme. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds.” One flight up Della ran, and
collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white,
chilly, hardly looked the “Sofronie.”
“Will you buy my hair?” asked Della.
“I buy hair,” said Madame. “Take yer hat off and
let’s have a sight at the looks of it.”
Down rippled the brown cascade.
“Twenty dollars,” said Madame, lifting the mass with a practised
hand.
“Give it to me quick,” said Della.
Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed
metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There
was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them
inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly
proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious
ornamentation—as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As
soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim’s. It was like him. Quietness
and value—the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from
her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his
watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the
watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather
strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and
reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work
repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a
tremendous task, dear friends—a mammoth task.
Within forty minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that
made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection
in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
“If Jim doesn’t kill me,” she said to herself, “before he takes a second
look at me, he’ll say I look like a
At 7 o’clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the
stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the
corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his
step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just
a moment. She had a habit of saying a little silent prayer about the simplest
everyday things, and now she whispered: “Please God, make him think I am still
pretty.”
The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very
serious. Poor fellow, he was only twenty-two—and to be burdened with a family!
He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail.
His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she
could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor
disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared
for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.
Della wriggled off the table and went for him.
“Jim, darling,” she cried, “don’t look at me that way. I had my hair cut off
and sold because I couldn’t have lived through Christmas without giving you a
present. It’ll grow out again—you won’t mind, will you? I just had to do it. My
hair grows awfully fast. Say ‘Merry Christmas!’ Jim, and let’s be happy. You
don’t know what a nice—what a beautiful, nice gift I’ve got for you.”
“You’ve cut off your hair?” asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived
at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.
“Cut it off and sold it,” said Della. “Don’t you like me just as well,
anyhow? I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?”
Jim looked about the room curiously.
“You say your hair is gone?” he said, with an air almost of idiocy.
“You needn’t look for it,” said Della. “It’s sold, I tell you—sold and gone,
too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the
hairs of my head were numbered,” she went on with sudden serious sweetness,
“but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?”
Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For ten
seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the
other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the
difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi
brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will
be illuminated later on.
Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.
“Don’t make any mistake, Dell,” he said, “about me. I don’t think there’s
anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me
like my girl any less. But if you’ll unwrap that
package you may see why you had me going a while at first.”
White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper.
And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a
quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the
immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
For there lay The Combs—the set of combs, side and back, that Della had
worshipped long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell,
with jewelled rims—just the shade to wear in the
beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had
simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And
now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted
adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with
dim eyes and a smile and say: “My hair grows so fast, Jim!”
And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, “Oh, oh!”
Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly
upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection
of her bright and ardent spirit.
“Isn’t it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have to
look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see
how it looks on it.”
Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under
the back of his head and smiled.
“Dell,” said he, “let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep ’em a while. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold
the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops
on.”
The magi, as you know, were wise
men—wonderfully wise men—who brought gifts to the Babe
in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise,
their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange
in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful
chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for
each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the
wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the
wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are
wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi.