by Ruskin Bond
Where she stopped the sign read: "Mme. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds." One flight up Delia ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the "Sofronie."
"Will you buy my hair?" asked Delia.
"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 Delia.
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 Delia 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 seven 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. Delia 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 little silent prayers 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 stepped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Delia, 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.
Delia 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 it 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 labour.
"Cut it off and sold it," said Delia. "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 Delia. "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 a 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 Delia. 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 awhile 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 Delia had worshipped for 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 Delia 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 awhile. 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.
The Folder
BY NOEL LANGLEY
Another sort of magic comes from the pen of an eminent playwright and scriptwriter. A mysterious folder has an electrifying effect on several young people…
In the foyer of the Hotel Splendide, the news-stand and the tobacconist are combined in haughty style, sharing a palatial booth of marble and chromium. It is the only commercial note in the foyer; the rest looks like decadent Pompeii at the height of its luxury. The carpets sink submissively beneath your feet like eiderdown; the pillars glisten sleekly; the chairs and sofas look as if only Royalty could feel at home in them, and the palms, placed concentrically round the goldfish pool in the centre, lend an air of exotic pomp. Though a ceaseless human stream moves in and out of its august precincts from sunrise to sunrise, the air is always hushed and reverent. The lifts drift effortlessly from the upper floors, open their doors silently, and as silently and unobtrusi
vely glide upwards again, The page-boys never shout; they intone in modulated minor keys. The doors to the street are quilted and soundproof, and you must pass through two sets of them before the world is left behind you, and the Splendide envelops you in its mystic hush.
The staff at the Reception Desk resemble and behave like diplomats. It has been proved psychologically impossible for a bad cheque to be passed across their counter. Their restraint and tone act as a litmus-test upon the acid of a dishonest conscience. A bogus cheque would shrivel and fall to ashes as it slid across the shining counter of the Cashier's Desk, and invisible, sepulchral bells would toll a requiem for the soul of the imprudent gambler, fool enough to have tried it.
It is in the foyer that visitors and friends await audience with the guests, much as penitents await audience with the Pope. The favoured ones are eventually spirited away by a page-boy, to be swallowed for ever in the velvet silence of the hotel's inner maw; but the lesser mortals never advance further than the line of demarcation of the palms. They sink uneasily into the chairs and sofas, and put up a pitiful show of being at ease and unabashed by their surroundings; only the more abandoned smoke; and in the days before the war, the rest read periodicals that the hotel supplied in large leather folders with its crest stamped in gold upon the outer flap.
The war having impoverished even the inviolate precincts of the Splendide, the paper shortage having penetrated there as impudently as if the hotel were no better than it should be, many of the folders are now empty vessels,—nostalgic reminders of a way of English life that is now rattling in tumbrils to the guillotine.
A Miss Kittering worked in the news-stand, and a Miss Blombell presided over the tobacco. They were on moderately cordial terms, being ladies of refined temperament and sheltered upbringing, but they had their occasional differences. Such matters as the allocation of small change in the cash register, the reading of periodicals by Miss Blombell and the untidying of the displays, and the tendency on Miss Kittering's part to help herself, in Miss Blombell's absence, to cigarettes kept under the counter for favoured clientèle, would give rise to an occasional delicately phrased innuendo.
Miss Blombell was more romantic than Miss Kittering, and read avidly. Miss Kittering went hiking on Sundays and belonged to a gymnasium in Putney. Her father had been a lecturer in the University of London, and as a child she had been taken to Belgium for a fortnight, thus achieving a faint but undeniable air of cosmopolitan sophistication. She had a scarab ring that had come out of the tomb of some Pharaoh. It was a little too large and she kept it on her finger by lining the inside with a sliver of adhesive tape. During lulls in commerce, she was wont to sit upon her stool and idly buff the scarab with a small piece of chamois leather. She maintained that the stone breathed, and that to let it tarnish would bring the curse of the Pharaohs down on the heads of the Kitterings.
Miss Blombell's father was a waiter in Soho, and Miss Blombell had never been to the Continent. She was not beautiful but had an affectionate nature, and she painted her fingernails pale red. She was an ardent Socialist, and took full personal responsibility for the activities of His Majesty's Government, while Miss Kittering—an ardent Tory—hinted darkly at the Fall of England.
It was Miss Blombell who first perceived that there was some mystery attached to one of the leather folders on the table across the foyer. She was not sure when she noticed it for the first time: it permeated her consciousness gradually. In the morning, a young soldier had sat in the foyer for over an hour, twisting his cap and smoking and looking suitably out of place. He was a private, and the lowest rank to pace the Splendide, by normal standards, was that of brigadier. He was good-looking and his air was that of respectful equanimity to life in general. His boots were brightly polished, and his hair newly cut and brushed. The brass on him glittered proudly, and only his chain-smoking gave away his inner misgivings.
He had looked wanly though the empty folders in search of something to read, and then sat back and gave himself up to watching the parade of great and near-great that undulated unhurriedly to and from the lifts and the quilted doors.
When he had been there an hour, a family emerged from one of the lifts and coursed majestically towards him. The father and mother were elderly and arrayed in slightly old-fashioned glory, and their daughter, walking a little ahead and looking eagerly about her, was young and pretty and as well-bred as a racehorse. The soldier stood up, and though he kept a poker-face, his adoration flowed through it so palpably that not even a child of five could have been deceived. He and the girl were in love, and were blissfully deluded into thinking they kept it a secret from the world.
The parents were introduced, and the group sat down sedately. Polite conversation came into play, and after a moment or so it was obvious even to Miss Blombell at the far end of the foyer that a steel curtain was lowering itself slowly between the parents and the young man. It could not have been more clear to Miss Blombell that he was being subjected to a grilling examination, and that he was being found not suitable. His shyness took the form of a kind of ingratiating humility; his anxiety to please fell wider and wider of the mark.
The parents could not have been more magnanimous and open-minded. It was clear that their policy was to give him full credit for his assets before they found him wanting in essentials. The girl, watching the effect of his personality on her parents, and theirs on him, for the first time, was obviously giving way to a slow, quiet despair. In the clear light of unsentimental reality, she saw, for the first time, the long complicated vista of incompatibilities that would be their future; the unending readjustments, the two diametric ways of life and thought that would clash and grate and ultimately reach deadlock.
The father took the offensive, and in ponderous and patient idiom slowly asked questions, and added profound comments to the young soldier's answers, nodding sympathetically when some point he had made could not be adequately answered. The idyllic rapture of the young people's love was being scientifically dismantled, hope by hope.
Miss Blombell became so engrossed that she inadvertently sold a casual customer a packet of holy cigarettes from under the counter. At the end of half an hour the issue was no longer a doubtful one. The soldier had been driven from the field, and the parents were hoisting their victorious colours. The girl was pale and quiet; she no longer sought the soldier's glance, thereby to reaffirm his courage for him: she looked down at her gloves, and brushed non-existent creases from her dress, or stared over her father's head at the palms.
Later, Miss Blombell knew, when she was alone, she would cry; because it was all over. The soldier had become stiff and awkward; he faltered now when he answered, and otherwise made no effort to speak; it was obviously taking all his effort to keep his face mask-like. Already sick, numb, despairing ache had routed the joy in his breast.
Miss Blombell felt like a receiving set picking up short-wave emotions; she could almost reduplicate, in her own breast, the feeling of anguish and defeat in the girl. She had a wild, unseemly desire to shout across the foyer, "Keep your heart up! Don't let those old fogies get you down!"
The father called a page-boy and ordered drinks—they were to part on civil terms, with all the laws of courtesy and civility respected. The tension relaxed into natural apathy, and the soldier picked up one of the leather folders and opened it idly. He sat for a moment looking at it.
And then, suddenly, his mood began to alter. His body straightened, his head came up. Miss Blombell felt a shiver of excitement run down her spine. The soldier handed the folder silently and casually to the girl, as if it were of no more importance than an ash-tray or a dropped glove; and the girl, taking it with a faintly puzzled air, opened it listlessly. The page-boy left, and the parents returned their attention to the two young people; but it was clear now that a new element had entered into the situation, for suddenly the girl began to talk, slowly at first, but with increasing assurance, and the mother and father changed their positions in their chairs, as i
f confounded and pained.
Miss Blombell was distracted at this moment by an elderly lady demanding a Havana cigar, and when she was able to catch up with the quartet again, the girl was on the edge of her chair, her head tilted defiantly, and her words came steadily and with authority. The soldier's attitude had changed, too. He leaned forward, and his eyes were fixed on hers with pride and admiration. Occasionally he darted a glance at her mother and father, but there was nothing down-trodden about him now. It was clear that the parents were struggling to keep their tempers in check to prevent an unseemly exhibition in a public place. The mother had become soothing, and the father's hand waved placatingly, but the tide, having turned, now swept on, and the girl rose suddenly, held out her hand to the soldier, and pulled him towards her. They walked firmly and purposefully through the foyer and out of the quilted doors into the street, and the parents, after an ineffectual flutter, rose and made their way to the lift, talking agitatedly in undertones.
Miss Blombell, elated, removed her spectacles and wiped them. Her heart felt foolishly light and free, as if it were she herself who had flaunted the parents and chosen her own way of life. For a moment she felt ridiculously young. It took a sharp cough from Miss Kittering to bring her back to earth, to attend to a Foreign Office official in need of cigarettes from the secret cache. When her mind had leisure to return to the subject, she began to speculate as to what had been in the folder…
"Miss Kittering," she said casually, "did you supply the magazines for the folders on that table over there?"
"Indeed I did not," Miss Kittering made answer, "I was unaware of the presence of magazines in the folders."
"Well, that is odd, isn't it?" said Miss Blombell, greatly intrigued, but in no way anxious to share confidences with Miss Kittering. As she spoke, she saw an elderly woman, thumbing aimlessly through the folders, suddenly pause, twitch, and slap the folder shut with a gesture of supercilious irritation.