O. Henry

                       An Unfinished Story

WE NO LONGER GROAN and heap ashes upon our heads when the flames of 
Tophet are mentioned. For, even the preachers have begun to tell us 
that God is radium, or ether or some scientific compound, and that the 
worst we wicked ones may expect is a chemical reaction. This is a 
pleasing hypothesis; but there lingers yet some of the old, goodly 
terror of orthodoxy.
   There are but two subjects upon which one may discourse with a free 
imagination, and without the possibility of being controverted. You 
may talk of your dreams; and you may tell what you heard a parrot say. 
Both Morpheus and the bird are incompetent witnesses; and your 
listener dare not attack your recital. The baseless fabric of a 
vision, then, shall furnish my theme - chosen with apologies and 
regrets instead of the more limited field of Pretty Polly's small 
talk.
   I had a dream that was so far removed from the higher criticism 
that it had to do with the ancient, respectable, and lamented bar-of-
judgment theory.
   Gabriel had played his trump; and those of us who could not follow 
suit were arraigned for examination. I noticed at one side a gathering 
of professional bondsmen in solemn black and collars that buttoned 
behind; but it seemed there was some trouble about their real estate 
titles; and they did not appear to be getting any of us out.
   A fly cop - an angel policeman - flew over to me and took me by the 
left wing. Near at hand was a group of very prosperous-looking spirits 
arraigned for Judgment.
   `Do you belong with that bunch?' the policeman asked. 
   `Who are they?' was my answer.
   `Why,' said he, `they are -'
   But this irrelevant stuff is taking up space that the story should 
occupy.
   Dulcie worked in a department store. She sold Hamburg edging, or 
stuffed peppers, or automobiles, or other little trinkets such as they 
keep in department stores. Of what she earned, Dulcie received six 
dollars per week. The remainder was credited to her and debited to 
somebody else's account in the ledger kept by G - Oh, primal energy, 
you say, Reverend Doctor - Well then, in the Ledger of Primal Energy.
   During her first year in the store, Dulcie was paid five dollars 
per week. It would be instructive to know how she lived on that 
amount. Don't care? Very well; probably you are interested in larger 
amounts. Six dollars is a larger amount. I will tell you how she lived 
on six dollars per week.
   One afternoon at six, when Dulcie was sticking her hat-pin within 
an eighth of an inch of her medulla oblongata, she said to her chum, 
Sadie - the girl that waits on you with her left side:
   `Say, Sade, I made a date for dinner this evening with Piggy.' 
   `You never did!' exclaimed Sadie admiringly. `Well, ain't you the 
lucky one? Piggy's an awful swell; and he always takes a girl to swell 
places. He took Blanche up to the Hoffman House one evening, where 
they have swell music, and you see a lot of swells. You'll have a 
swell time, Dulcie.'
   Dulcie hurried off homeward. Her eyes were shining, and her cheeks 
showed the delicate pink of life's - real life's - approaching dawn. 
It was Friday; and she had fifty cents left of her last week's wages.
   The streets were filled with the rush-hour floods of people. The 
electric lights of Broadway were glowing - calling moths from miles, 
from leagues, from hundreds of leagues out of darkness around to come 
in and attend the singeing school. Men in accurate clothes, with faces 
like those carved on cherry-stones by the old salts in sailors' homes, 
turned and stared at Dulcie as she sped, unheeding, past them. 
Manhattan, the night-blooming cereus, was beginning to unfold its 
dead-white, heavy-odoured petals.
   Dulcie stopped in a store where goods were cheap and bought an 
imitation lace collar with her fifty cents. That money was to have 
been spent otherwise - fifteen cents for supper, ten cents for 
breakfast, ten cents for lunch. Another dime was to be added to her 
small store of savings; and five cents was to be squandered for 
liquorice drops - the kind that made your cheek look like the 
toothache, and last as long. The liquorice was an extravagance almost 
a carouse - but what is life without pleasures?
   Dulcie lived in a furnished room. There is this difference between 
a furnished room and a boarding-house. In a furnished room, other 
people do not know it when you go hungry.
   Dulcie went up to her room - the third floor back in a West Side 
brownstone-front. She lit the gas. Scientists tell us that the diamond 
is the hardest substance known. Their mistake. Landladies know of a 
compound beside which the diamond is as putty. They pack it in the 
tips of gas-burners; and one may stand on a chair and dig at it in 
vain until one's fingers are pink and bruised. A hairpin will not 
remove it; therefore let us call it immovable.
   So Dulcie lit the gas. In its one-fourth-candlepower glow we will 
observe the room.
   Couch-bed, dresser, table, washstand, chair - of this much the 
landlady was guilty. The rest was Dulcie's. On the dresser were her 
treasures - a gilt china vase presented to her by Sadie, a calendar 
issued by a pickle works, a book on the divination of dreams, some 
rice powder in a glass dish, and a cluster of artificial cherries tied 
with a pink ribbon.
   Against the wrinkly mirror stood pictures of General Kitchener, 
William Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini. 
Against one wall was a plaster of Paris plaque of an O'Callahan in a 
Roman helmet. Near it was a violent oleograph of a lemon-coloured 
child assaulting an inflammatory butterfly. This was Dulcie's final 
judgment in art; but it had never been upset. Her rest had never been 
disturbed by whispers of stolen copes; no critic had elevated his 
eyebrows at her infantile entomologist.
   Piggy was to call for her at seven. While she swiftly makes ready, 
let us discreetly face the other way and gossip.
   For the room, Dulcie paid two dollars per week. On weekdays her 
breakfast cost ten cents; she made coffee and cooked an egg over the 
gaslight while she was dressing. On Sunday mornings she feasted 
royally on veal chops and pineapple fritters at `Billy's' restaurant, 
at a cost of twenty-five cents - and tipped the waitress ten cents. 
New York presents so many temptations for one to run into 
extravagance. She had her lunches in the department-store restaurant 
at a cost of sixty cents for the week; dinners were $1.05. The evening 
papers - show me a New Yorker going without his daily paper! - came to 
six cents; and two Sunday papers - one for the personal column and the 
other to read - were ten cents. The total amounts to $4.76. Now, one 
has to buy clothes, and – 
   I give it up. I hear of wonderful bargains in fabrics, and of 
miracles performed with needle and thread; but I am in doubt. I hold 
my pen poised in vain when I would add to Dulcie's life some of those 
joys that belong to woman by virtue of all the unwritten, sacred, 
natural, inactive ordinances of the equity of heaven. Twice she had 
been to Coney Island and had ridden the hobby-horses. 'Tis a weary 
thing to count your pleasures by summers instead of by hours.
   Piggy needs but a word. When the girls named him, an undeserving 
stigma was cast upon the noble family of swine. The words-of three-
letters lesson in the old blue spelling-book begins with Piggy's 
biography. He was fat; he had the soul of a rat, the habits of a bat, 
and the magnanimity of a cat.... He wore expensive clothes; and was a 
connoisseur in starvation. He could look at
a show-girl and tell you to an hour how long it had been since she had 
eaten anything more nourishing than marsh-mallows and tea. He hung 
about the shopping districts, and prowled around in department stores 
with his invitations to dinner. Men who escort dogs upon the streets 
at the end of a string look down upon him. He is a type; I can dwell 
upon him no longer; my pen is not the kind intended for him; I am no 
carpenter.
   At ten minutes to seven Dulcie was ready. She looked at herself in 
the wrinkly mirror. The reflection was satisfactory. The dark blue 
dress, fitting without a wrinkle, the hat with its jaunty black 
feather, the but-slightly-soiled gloves - all representing self 
denial, even of food itself - were vastly becoming.
   Dulcie forgot everything else for a moment except that she was 
beautiful, and that life was about to lift a corner of its mysterious 
veil for her to observe its wonders. No gentleman had ever asked her 
out before. Now she was going for a brief moment into the glitter and 
exalted show.
The girls said that Piggy was a `spender.' There would be a grand 
dinner, and music, and splendidly dressed ladies to look at, and 
things to eat that strangely twisted the girls' jaws when they tried 
to tell about them. No doubt she would be asked out again.
   There was a blue pongee suit in a window that she knew - by saving 
twenty cents a week instead of ten, in - let's see - Oh, it would run 
into years! But there was a second-hand store in Seventh Avenue where 
   Somebody knocked at the door. Dulcie opened it. The landlady stood 
there with a spurious smile, sniffing for cooking by stolen gas. 
   `A gentleman's downstairs to see you,' she said. `Name is Mr. 
Wiggins.'
   By such epithet was Piggy known to unfortunate ones who had to take 
him seriously.
   Dulcie turned to the dresser to get her handkerchief; then she 
stopped still, and bit her underlip hard. While looking in her mirror 
she had seen fairyland and herself, a princess, just awakening from a 
long slumber. She had forgotten one that was watching her with sad, 
beautiful, stern eyes - the only one there was to approve or condemn 
what she did. Straight and slender and tall, with a look of sorrowful 
reproach on his handsome, melancholy face, General Kitchener fixed his 
wonderful eyes on her out of his gilt photograph frame on the dresser.
   Dulcie turned like an automatic doll to the landlady.
   `Tell him I can't go,' she said dully. `Tell him I'm sick, or 
something. Tell him I'm not going out.'
   After the door was closed and locked, Dulcie fell upon her bed, 
crushing her black tip, and cried for ten minutes. General Kitchener 
was her only friend. He was Dulcie's ideal of a gallant knight. He 
looked as if he might have a secret sorrow, and his wonderful 
moustache was a dream, and she was a little afraid of that stern yet 
tender look in his eyes. She used to have little fancies that he would 
call at the house some time; and ask for her, with his sword clanking 
against his high boots. Once, when a boy was rattling a piece of chain 
against a lamp-post she had opened the window and looked out. But 
there was no use. She knew that General Kitchener was away over in 
Japan leading his army against the savage Turks; and he would never 
step out of his gilt frame for her. Yet one look from him had 
vanquished Piggy that night. Yes, for that night.
   When her cry was over Dulcie got up and took off her best dress, 
and put on her old blue kimono. She wanted no dinner. She sang two 
verses of `Sammy.' Then she became intensely interested in a little 
red speck on the side of her nose. And after that was attended to, she 
drew up a chair to the rickety table, and told her fortune with an old 
deck of cards.
   `The horrid, impudent thing!' she said aloud `And I never gave him 
a word or a look to make him think it!
   At nine o'clock Dulcie took a tin box of crackers and a little pot 
of raspberry jam out of her trunk and had a feast. She offered General 
Kitchener some jam on a cracker; but he only looked at her as the 
Sphinx would have looked at a butterfly - if there are butterflies in 
the desert.
   `Don't eat if you don't want to;' said Dulcie `And don't put on so 
many airs and scold so with your eyes. I wonder if you'd be so 
superior and snippy if you had to live on six dollars a week.'
   It was not a good sign for Dulcie to be rude to General Kitchener. 
And then she turned Benvenuto Cellini face downward with a severe 
gesture. But that was not inexcusable; for she had always thought he 
was Henry VIII, and she did not approve of him.
   At half past nine Dulcie took a last look at the pictures on the 
dresser, turned out the light, and skipped into bed. It's an awful 
thing to go to bed with a good-night look at General Kitchener, 
William Muldoon, the Duchess of Marlborough, and Benvenuto Cellini.
   This story really doesn't get anywhere at all. The rest of it comes 
later - some time when Piggy asks Dulcie again to dine with him, and 
she is feeling lonelier than usual, and General Kitchener happens to 
be looking the other way; and then 
   As I said before, I dreamed that I was standing near a crowd of 
prosperous-looking angels, and a policeman took me by the wing and 
asked if I belonged with them.
   `Who are they?' I asked.
   `Why,' said he, `they are the men who hired working-girls, and paid 
'em five or six dollars a week to live on. Are you one of the bunch?'
   `Not on your immortality,' said I. `I'm only the fellow that set 
fire to an orphan asylum, and murdered a blind man for his pennies.'