A Summary and Analysis of O. Henry’s ‘A Service of Love’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

The joy of reading an O. Henry story largely resides in the fun of trying to guess the twist in the tale before the end. No other writer of short stories made the plot twist such an integral part of his art, and he kept this up over numerous stories. The big, fat, cheap collection of 100 of his short stories which I own is only a ‘selected’ stories: he wrote many more.

‘A Service of Love’ reads like a lesser version of O. Henry’s best-known and most widely anthologised story, ‘The Gift of the Magi’. In that story, a young married couple named Jim and Della have little money with which to buy each other a present for Christmas.

They each have a possession in which they take great pride. For Jim, it’s a gold watch, while Della’s prized possession is her beautiful hair. Della goes to a woman who deals in hair goods. This woman agrees to buy Della’s hair for twenty dollars. With the newly acquired money, Della goes to buy a platinum fob chain for Jim’s gold watch. This costs her twenty-one dollars, leaving her just eighty-seven cents in the whole world. When she gets home, she sets about curling what’s left of her hair so it looks presentable.

When Jim gets home, he is surprised by his wife’s actions, but when she explains why she had her hair cut off, he embraces her and gives her the present he has bought her: two jewelled tortoiseshell combs she has long admired in a shop window. The combs are useless to her until her hair grows out again, but at least she can give Jim his present. But in a last twist, Jim tells Della that he sold his gold watch to pay for the expensive combs he bought for her. So now, she has two combs but no hair to use them on, and he has a platinum fob chain for a gold watch he no longer owns.

The moral of the tale, however, is that they love each other, and their selfless gestures – whilst ending in failure on a material level – reveal how devoted they are to making each other happy. This is, in short, a greater ‘gift’ than any physical possession.

In ‘A Service of Love’, we also have a young married couple: Joe (rather than Jim) and Delia (rather than Della). The similarities in the character names suggests that O. Henry wished us to see this story as a sort of companion-piece to ‘The Gift of the Magi’, although the only person who could confirm that is O. Henry himself (and he’s unlikely to do so, having been dead since 1910).

Joe and Delia are both artists: Joe Larrabee is a painter and Delia Caruthers is a singer and musician. The two marry, bonding over their shared love of art; indeed, a mantra repeated at several times in the story is ‘when one loves one’s art no service seems too hard’.

They love each other and they love what they do. Unfortunately, it doesn’t put much food on the table, and they barely have enough money. So Delia goes to find work giving music lessons. She comes home announcing she’s found a pupil, the daughter of a general, named Clementina. She produces some money and tells Joe how delightful the family is.

A short while after this, Joe also produces some money, telling Delia he’s sold one of his paintings to a man who has commissioned more work from him. They are both delighted they’re earning money from their art: even though Delia isn’t performing as a musician, teaching offers her a chance to use her musical talent to earn money for them.

But when Delia arrives home one day with her hand bandaged, we discover the truth. She claims that Clementina, her music pupil, had cooked a Welsh rabbit and poured boiling water over Delia’s hand when serving it up, but Joe asks her to tell him the truth. She confesses that there are no music lessons and she’s been earning money through ironing clothes, and that she injured her hand when a colleague burned her with an iron (presumably by accident, though this is never specified).

She asks Joe how he knows she was lying, and he tells her that he has been earning his money not by selling his paintings, but by working in the engine room of the same laundry where Delia is working. They both laugh, and Joe goes to repeat the line, ‘when one loves one’s art no service seems too hard’, but Delia forestalls him, telling him that the ‘one’s art’ part is not necessary: when one loves, no service seems too hard.

So, in short, the love the devoted couple feel for each other emerges as the most important thing: not their ability to make money from their art, but their willingness to take on menial jobs that pay only a little money, so they can support each other and pay their bills. It’s a straightforward story that essentially covers the same ground as ‘The Gift of the Magi’, so this is probably why it’s so little-known in comparison with that story: O. Henry did this same thing, and did it better, in a story that also had Christmas as a setting, ensuring it would become part of the recommended Christmas reading alongside (if after) A Christmas Carol.

What O. Henry did in ‘A Service of Love’, however, was work in several of his other major themes. So in this respect, it’s even more of a quintessential O. Henry story than its more famous festive counterpart. It has the young married couple struggling to make ends meet and a similarly sentimental, pat twist ending, but O. Henry also weaves in the struggling artist motif which we see in some of his other work (notably in ‘The Last Leaf’, his other best-known tale).

But there’s something more, too: in creating their own fictions about how they have been earning the money they bring home, Joe and Delia are ‘artists’ in another sense: they are storytellers, much like O. Henry himself, spinning a believable but satisfying yarn about how they have used their artistic talents to put food on the table.