An Adjustment of Nature by O Henry

Books at Bedtime by Calming Anxiety The Adjustment of Nature by O Henry In an art exhibition the other day I saw a painting that had been sold for $5,000 The painter was a young scrub out of the west named Kraft who had a favourite food and a pet theory His papillum was an un-went-chibal belief in the unearing artistic adjustment of nature His theory was fixed around corned beefed hash with poached eggs There was a story behind the picture so I went home and let it drip out of a fountain pen The idea of Kraft But that is not the beginning of the story Three years ago Kraft, Bill Judkins, opposed and I took our meals at Cypher's on 8th Avenue I say took this was when we had money Cypher just got it off us As he expressed us with no credit We went in, called for food and ate it We paid or we did not pay We had confidence in Cypher's soleness and smoldering the russety Deep down in his sunless soul He was either a prince, a fool or an artist He sat at a worm eaten desk Covered with files of waiter's check So old that I was sure the bottomest one was for clams that Hendrick Hudson had eaten and paid for Cypher had the power in common with Napoleon III of the Goggle-eyed perch of throwing a film over his eyes rendering opaque the windows of his song Once when we left him unpaid with a grigis excuses I looked back and saw him shaking with an audible laugh that behind his film Now and then we paid up back scores But the chief thing at Cypher's was Millie Millie was a waitress She was a grand example of craft theory of the artistic adjustment of nature She belonged largely to waiting as Minerva did to the art of scrapping or venous to the science of serious flirtation Pedestalt and Indrons She might have stood with a noblest of her heroic sisters at liver and bacon in livening the world She belonged to Cypher's You expected to see her colossal figure loomed through that reeking blue cloud of smoke from the frim fat just as you expected the palisades to appear through the drifting Hudson River Vogue There amid the steam of vegetables and the vapors of acres of ham and the crash of crockery the clatter of steel the screaming of short orders the cries of the hungering and all the horror termal to feeding man surrounded by swarms of the buzzing wind-beast bequeathed us by Pharaoh Millie steered her magnificent way like some great liner cleaving among the canoes and howling savages Our goddess of grub was built online so majestic they could be followed only with all her sleeves were always rolled above her elbows she could have taken us the three mascateers in her two hands and dropped us out of the window She had seen few years than any of us but she was such superb eithard and simplicity that she mothered us from the beginning Cypher's stall of eithables she poured out upon us with royal indifference to the price and quantity as from the corner copier they knew no exhaustion her voice it rang like a silver great bell her smile was many toothed and frequent she seemed like a yellow sunrise on a mountain top I never saw her but I thought of the oesnight and yet somehow I could never think of her as existing outside of Cypher's their nature had placed her and she had taken root and grown mightily she seemed happy and took her few poor dollars on Saturday nights with the flushed pleasure of a child that receives an unexpected donation it was craft who first voiced the fear that each of us must have held later than me it came up a purpose of course and certain questions of art at which we were hammering one of us compared the harmony existing between a Hayden symphony and a pistach ice cream to the exquisite congruity between milley and cypherens there is a certain fate hanging over milley said craft and if it overtakes her she is lost to Cypherens and to us she will grow fat ask Judkins fiercely she will go to night school and become refined I ventured anxiously it is this said craft punctuating in a puddle of spilled coffee with a stiff forefinger Caesar had his brootus the cotton has its bowl worm the chorus girl has her pits burger the summer brawder has its poison ivy and the hero has his Carnegie MEDOM art has its morgan the rose has its "speak" I interrupted much perturbed you do not think that milley will begin to lace one day concluded craft solemnly there will come to ciphers a slate of beans a millionaire lumberman from Wisconsin and he will marry milley never exclaimed Judkins and I in horror a lumberman repeated craft horsey and a millionaire lumberman I sighed despairing from Wisconsin grown Judkins we agreed that the awful fate seemed to minister few things were less improbable milley like some vast virgin stretcher pinewoods was made to catch the lumberman's eye and well we knew the habits of the badgers once fortune smiled upon them straight to the New York they high and lay their goods at the feet of the girl who served some beans in a beenery why? the alphabet itself can ivy the Sunday newspapers headliners work it to cut for him win some waitress wins wealthy Wisconsin woodsmann for a while we felt that milley was on the verge of being lost to us it was our love of the unearing artistic adjustment of nature that inspired us we could not give her over to a lumberman doubly accursed of by wealth and provincialism we shuddered think of milley with her voice modulated and her eyebrows covered pouring tea in the marble teepee of a tree murderer no in ciphers she belonged in the bacon smoke the cabbage perfume the grand wagnerean chorus of hurled ironstone china and the rattling castes our fears must have been prophetic for on that same evening the wildwood discharged upon us milley's preordained confiscator our fee to adjustment in order but Alaska and not Wisconsin bore the burden of the visitation we were at our supper of beef stew and dried apples when he trotted in as if on the heels of a dog team and made one of the mess at our table with the freedom of the camps he assaulted our ears and claimed the fellowship of men lost in the wilds of a harsh house we embraced him as a specimen and in three minutes we had all but died for one another as friends he was rugged, and bearded, and wind dried he had just come off the trail he said at one of the north-riff of ferries I fancied I could see the snow dust on the chill-coot yet powdering his shoulders and then he screwed the table with the nuggets stuffed beadwork and seal-pelts and the returned clon-diker and began to pray to us of his millions bankgrass for two millions was his summing up and a thousand a day piling up for my claims and now I'd like some beef stew and can peaches I've never got off the train I've washed out of Seattle and I'm hungry the stuff that others feed you on the pullmins don't count the gentleman order of what you need and then milly loomed up with a thousand dishes on her bare arm loomed up big and white and pink and awful as mounts and alias with a smile like day breaking in a gulge and the clon-diker and his pelts and nuggets his truss and let his jaw fall half way and stared at her you could almost see the diamond tiara on milly's brow and the hand embroidered silk periscounds that he meant to buy for her at last the bowlworm had attacked the cotton the poison ivy was reaching out its tendrils to entwine the summer border the millionaire lumberman then lead disguised as the elaskin mine was about to engulf our milly and upset nature's adjustment craft was the first to act he leaped up and pounded the clon-diker's back come out and drink he shouted drink first and eat afterwards jud conceased one arm and eye the other galee, roaringly irresistibly in jolly good fellow style we dragged him from the restaurant to a cafe stuffing the russets stuffing his pockets with his embalmed birds and indigestible nuggets bear he rumbled a roughly good humid protest that's the girl for my money he declared she can eat out of my skeleton for the rest of her life why? I've never seen such a fine girl I'm going back there and ask her to marry me I guess she won't want to slay me I guess she won't want to sling hash anymore when she sees the pile of dust I've got we'll take another whiskey and milk now craft persuaded with Satan smile I thought you up country fellows were better sports craft spent his puny store of coin at the bar and then gave jud cons and me such an appealing look that we went down to the last time we had in toasting our guests then when our ammunition was gone and the clon-diker still somewhat sober began to babble again of milley craft whispered into his ears such a polite barbed insults relating to people who were miserable with their funds that the minor crashed down handful after handful of silver notes calling for all the fluids in the world to drown the imputation thus the work was accomplished with his own guns we drove him from the field and then we had him carted to a distance small hotel and put to bed with his nuggets and his baby sealed skin stuffed around him he will never find ciphers again said craft he were of her pose to the first white ape from he sees in a dairy restaurant tomorrow and milley I mean the natural adjustment is saved and back to ciphers went we through and finding customers scarce we joined hands and did an Indian dance with millionth the center this I say happened three years ago and about that time a little luck descended upon us three and we were enabled to buy coslier and less wholesome food than ciphers our paths separated and I saw craft no more and jettkin seldom but as I was in the middle of the night as I said I saw a painting the other day that was sold for five thousand dollars the title was Bodicea and the figure seemed to fill out of all the doors but of all the pictures of myers who stood before it I believe I was the only one who longed for Bodicea to stalk from her frame bringing me corned beef hash with poached eggs I hurried away to see craft his satanic eyes were the same his hair was worse tangled but his clothes had been made by a tailor I didn't know I said to him we bought a cottage in the Bronx with the money said he any evening at seven then said I when you led us against the lumberman the clon-diker it wasn't altogether on account of the unhearing artist a adjustment of nature well not altogether said craft with a grin