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Read and recorded by Betsie Bush.
Marquette, Michigan, December 2005.
The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry
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 Sheba lived in the flat across
the airshaft, Della would have let her hair
hang out the window some day to dry just to
depreciate Her Majesty’s jewels and gifts.
Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all
his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim
would have pulled out his watch every time
he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard
from envy.
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 Coney Island
chorus girl.
But what could I do—oh! what could I do
with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?”
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.
End of The Gift of the Magi.
