THE UNFINISHED STORY
Written by O. Henry, and Reprinted from McClure's Magazine
We no longer groan and heap ashes upon our heads when the
flames of Tophet are mentioned. For even the preachers have begun
to te'l us that God is radium, or ether" or some scientific compound,
and that the worst we wicked ones may expect is a chemical reac
tion. This is a pleasing hypothesis ; but there lingers yet some of the
eld, goodly terror of orthodoxy.
There art but two subjects upon which one may discourse with a
iree 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, shal1 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 fol
low 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 ange1 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 thev?" was mv answer. -
' Why .".said he, "they afe "
But this irrelevant stuff is taking up space that the story should
occupy.
Dulcie worked in a department store. She sold Hamburg edging,
or suffed peppers, or automobiles, or other little trinkets such as they
keep in department stores. Of what she earned, Dulcie received six
do'lars 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; probacy 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 Ducie was sticking her hat-pin
within an eighth of an inch of her medu'la 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 swel1 places. He took Blanche up to the Hoffman house one even
ing, where they have swell music, and you see a lot of swells. Youll
have a swell time, Dulcie." "
Dulcie hurried homeward. Her - eyes were shining, and her
cheeks showed the delicate pink of Hfe'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 !eagues, from hundreds of leagues out of darkness around td
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-colored petals. . :
Dulcie stopped in a store where goods were cheap and bought an
imitation lace colar with her fifty cents. That money was to have
been spent otherwise fifteen cents for supper, ten cents for break
fast, ten cents for lunch ; another dime was to be added to her small
store of savings; and five cents was to be squandered for licorice
drops the kind that make your cheek look like the toothache, and
last as long. The licorice was an extravagance almost a carouse
tut what is life without pleasures?
DuUrie lived in a furnished room. There is this difference be
tween a furnished room and a boarding-house. In a. furnished room,
other people do not know it when you are -hungry.- -
Dulcie went up to her room the third floor back in a west side
brown-stone front. She lit the gas. Scientists tell us that the dia
mond 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 in vain until one's fingers are pink and bruised. A hairpin will
rot remove it ; therefore they call it immovable.
So Dulcie it the gas. In its one-fourth-candle-power 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 calen
dar 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 up with a pink ribbon. Against the wrinkly mirror stood pic
tures of General Kitchener, William Muldoon, the Duchess of Marl
borough, and Benvenuto Cellini. Against one wall was a plaster-of-paris
plaque of an O'Callahan in a Roman helmet. Near it was a
vio!ent oleograph of a lemon-colored 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 eye-brows 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 dolars per week. On week days
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" res
taurant, 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
Yorker going without his daily paper ! one for the personal column
and the other to read were ten cents. - The tota1 amounts to $4.76.
Now. one has to buy clothes and
I give it up. I hear of wonderful bargains in fabrics, and of mir
acles 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, sa
cred, 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 gir's named him, an unde
served 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 expens
ive clothes ; and was a connoisseur in starvation. He could look at
a shop-girl and tel1 you to an hour how long it had been since she had
eaten anything more nourishing than marshmallows 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
b5ue' 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 Hft 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 tel about them. No doubt she would be asked out again. There
was a blue pongee suit in a window that she knew ; by saving tenty
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.
Bu such epithet as Piggy known to unfortunate ones who had
to take him seriously.
Dulcie turned to the dresser to get her handkerchief; and then
she stopped still and bit her under lip hard. WhPe 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
Avith 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 me1ancholy face, General Kitch-
