An Unfinished Story by O Henry

Books of Bed time by calming anxiety, an unfinished story by O Henry.

We no longer groan and heap ashes upon our heads when the flames of Toffit are mentioned. For even the preachers have begun to tell us that God is radium, or either awesome scientific compound, and that the worst we wicked ones may expect is a chemical reaction. This is a pleasing hypothesis for their 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 contraverted. 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 you'll listen a 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 feel of petty police 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 would not follow suit were aryne 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 it hand was a group of very prosperous looking spirits aryne for judgment.

Do you belong with that bunch, the policeman asked? Who are they with my answer? Why said he? They are, but this is relevant stuff is taking up space that the story should occupy.

Delcy worked in a department store. She sold hamburger kitchen of stuffed peppers or automobiles or other little trinkets such as they keep in department stores. Of what she earned, Delcy received $6 per week. The remainder was credited to her and depeted to someone else's account in the ledger kept by G.O. Primal energy, you say Reverend Doctor?

Well then, in the ledger of Primal energy. During her first year in the store, Delcy was paid $5 per week. It would be instructive to know that she lived on that amount. Don't care?

Very well. Probably, you are interested in larger amounts. $6 is a larger amount. I will tell you how we lived on $6 per week.

One afternoon at 6, when Delcy was sticking her hat pin with an 8th of an inch of her medulla oblongata. She said to her chum, Sadie, the girl waits on you with her left side. Say, Sadie, I made a date for dinner this evening with Piggy. You never did.

Exclaim Sadie admiringly. Well, an either 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.

She'll have a swell time, Delcy. Delcy hurried home with. 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 50 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 the darkness, around to come in and attend to the singe-ing school. Men, in accurate clothes, with faces like those carved on cherry stones by the old salts and sailors homes, turned and stared at Delcy. As she sped and heeding passed them.

Manhattan, the night blooming serice, was beginning to unfold its dead white, heavy-oated petals. Delcy stopped in a store where goods were cheap and bought an imitation lace collar with her 50 cents. Money was to have been spent otherwise, 15 cents for supper, 10 cents for breakfast, 10 cents for lunch. Another dime was to be added to her small store of savings, and 5 cents was to be squandered for the licorice drops, the kind that made your cheek look like the two-saic and are last as long.

The licorice was an extravagant, almost a carousel, but what is life without pleasures?

Delcy lived in a furnished room, there is a difference between a furnished room and a boarding house. In a furnished room other people do not know it when you go hungry. Delcy went up to her room, the third floor back in the west side brownstone front. She lit the gas.

Scientists tell us that the diamond is the hardest substance known, their mistake. Land ladies know of a compound beside which the diamond is as putty. They pack it into their tips of their gas burners and one may stand on a chair and dig it in vain until one's fingers are pink and bruised. A hairpin will not remove it, therefore let us call it 'emoveable'.

So Delcy lit the gas. In its one fourth candle power glow we will observe the room, couch bed, dresser, table, washstand chair of this much the lady was guilty. The rest was Delcy's. On the dresser were her treasures.

A guilt 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 rink limera stood pictures of general kitchen, William Muldoon, the Duchess of Malbra and Benvento Salini.

Against one wall was a plaster of Paris plaque of an oak halahann in a Roman helmet. Here it was a violet oleograph of a lemon coloured child assaulting an inflammatory butterfly.

This was Delcy's final judgement 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. Tiggy was to call for her at seven while she swiftly makes ready, let us discreetly face the other way and gossip.

For the room, Delcy paid two dollars per week. One week days her breakfast cost ten cents. She made coffee and cooked an egg over the gas light to what she was dressing. On Sunday mornings, she feasted royally on veal chops and pineapple fritties at Billy's restaurant at a cost of 25 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 60 cents per week. Dinners were one dollar and five. The evening papers show me a new Yorker going without a 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 amount of four dollars and seventy-six. Now one has to buy clothes and I give it up. I hear of wonderful bargains and fabrics and of miracles performed with a needle and thread, but I am in doubt. I hold my pen poised in vain when I would add to Delcy's life some of those choice that belonged to women by virtue of all the unwritten, all the sacred, natural inactive ordinances of the equity of heaven.

Twice she had been to Coney Island and had ridden the hobby horses. It is a weary thing to count your pleasures by summer instead of hours. Picking needs but a word. When the girls named him an undeserving stidmer was cast upon the no-mil family of swine.

The words of three letters lessons in the old blue spelling book begins with Piggie's biography. He was fat. He had the soul of a rat, the habits of a bat and the magnumity of a cat. He wore expensive clothes and was a connoisseur in starvation.

He could look at a shopgirl and tell you to an hour how long it had been since she had eaten anything more nourishing than Marshmallow's and tea. He hung about the shopping districts and prowled around in department stores with his invitations to dinner. The men who escort dogs upon the streets at the end of a string looked 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, Delcy 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 butt tightly soiled curves. Or presenting self-denial, even of food itself, was vastly becoming.

Delcy 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, that there would be a grand dinner and music and splendidly dressed ladies to look at.

With things to eat that strangely twisted the girls' jaws when they tried to tell them about it. No doubt she would be asked out again. There was a blue ponjé suit in a window that she knew by saving twenty sysunts 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. Delcy opened it. The landlady stood there with a speurious smile, sniffing for cooking by stolen gas. A gentleman downstairs to see you, she said, "Name is Mr. Wiggins."

My such epithet was Piggy known to unfortunate ones who had taken to him seriously. Delcy turned to the dresser to get her handkerchief and then she stopped still. A bit her underlip hard. While looking in the mirror she had seen fairyland and herself a princess just awaking 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 guilt photographic frame on the dresser.

Delcy 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, Delcy fell upon the bed, crushing her black tip and cried for ten minutes. General Kitchener was her only friend. He was Delcy's ideal of a gallant night. 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 sometime 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'd 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 guilt frame for her.

But one look from him had vanquished Piggy that night, yes, for that night. When her cry was over, Delcy 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 recady 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, Delcy 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 were better flies in the desert.

Don't eat it, if you don't want to, said Delcy and don't put on so many heirs and skulls 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 Delcy to be rude to General Kitchener. And then she turned, Bernamento Salini faced downward with a severe gesture.

But that was not inexcusable. She had always thought he was Henry VIII and she did not approve of him. At half past nine, Delcy took a last look at the pictures on the dresser, turned out a light and skipped into bed. It was an awful thing to go to bed with a good night look at General Kitchener, William Aldo, the Duchess of Marlborough and Bernamento Salini.

This story rarely doesn't go anywhere at all. The rest of it comes later, sometimes when Piggy asked Delcy again to dine with him and she is feeling lollier than usual. And General Kitchener happens to be looking the other way and then, well, 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 me if I belonged with him. "Who are they?" I asked.

"Why?" said he. They are the men who hired working girls and paid them five or six dollars a week to live on. And you are 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.