The Mariposa Bank Mystery Suicide is a thing that ought not to be committed without very careful thought.It often involves serious consequences, and in some cases brings pain to others than oneself.
I don't say that there is no justification for it.There often is.
Anybody who has listened to certain kinds of music, or read certain kinds of poetry, or heard certain kinds of performances upon the concertina, will admit that there are some lives which ought not to be continued, and that even suicide has its brighter aspects.
But to commit suicide on grounds of love is at the best a very dubious experiment.I know that in this I am expressing an opinion contrary to that of most true lovers who embrace suicide on the slightest provocation as the only honourable termination of an existence that never ought to have begun.
I quite admit that there is a glamour and a sensation about the thing which has its charm, and that there is nothing like it for causing a girl to realize the value of the heart that she has broken and which breathed forgiveness upon her at the very moment when it held in its hand the half-pint of prussic acid that was to terminate its beating for ever.
But apart from the general merits of the question, I suppose there are few people, outside of lovers, who know what it is to commit suicide four times in five weeks.
Yet this was what happened to Mr.Pupkin, of the Exchange Bank of Mariposa.
Ever since he had known Zena Pepperleigh he had realized that his love for her was hopeless.She was too beautiful for him and too good for him; her father hated him and her mother despised him; his salary was too small and his own people were too rich.
If you add to all that that he came up to the judge's house one night and found a poet reciting verses to Zena, you will understand the suicide at once.It was one of those regular poets with a solemn jackass face, and lank parted hair and eyes like puddles of molasses.
I don't know how he came there--up from the city, probably--but there he was on the Pepperleighs' verandah that August evening.He was reciting poetry--either Tennyson's or Shelley's, or his own, you couldn't tell--and about him sat Zena with her hands clasped and Nora Gallagher looking at the sky and Jocelyn Drone gazing into infinity, and a little tubby woman looking at the poet with her head falling over sideways--in fact, there was a whole group of them.
I don't know what it is about poets that draws women to them in this way.But everybody knows that a poet has only to sit and saw the air with his hands and recite verses in a deep stupid voice, and all the women are crazy over him.Men despise him and would kick him off the verandah if they dared, but the women simply rave over him.
So Pupkin sat there in the gloom and listened to this poet reciting Browning and he realized that everybody understood it but him.He could see Zena with her eyes fixed on the poet as if she were hanging on to every syllable (she was; she needed to), and he stood it just about fifteen minutes and then slid off the side of the verandah and disappeared without even saying good-night.
He walked straight down Oneida Street and along the Main Street just as hard as he could go.There was only one purpose in his mind,--suicide.He was heading straight for Jim Eliot's drug store on the main corner and his idea was to buy a drink of chloroform and drink it and die right there on the spot.
As Pupkin walked down the street, the whole thing was so vivid in his mind that he could picture it to the remotest detail.He could even see it all in type, in big headings in the newspapers of the following day:
APPALLING SUICIDE.PETER PUPKIN POISONED.
He perhaps hoped that the thing might lead to some kind of public enquiry and that the question of Browning's poetry and whether it is altogether fair to allow of its general circulation would be fully ventilated in the newspapers.
Thinking of that, Pupkin came to the main corner.
On a warm August evening the drug store of Mariposa, as you know, is all a blaze of lights.You can hear the hissing of the soda-water fountain half a block away, and inside the store there are ever so many people--boys and girls and old people too--all drinking sarsaparilla and chocolate sundaes and lemon sours and foaming drinks that you take out of long straws.There is such a laughing and a talking as you never heard, and the girls are all in white and pink and cambridge blue, and the soda fountain is of white marble with silver taps, and it hisses and sputters, and Jim Eliot and his assistant wear white coats with red geraniums in them, and it's just as gay as gay.
The foyer of the opera in Paris may be a fine sight, but I doubt if it can compare with the inside of Eliot's drug store in Mariposa--for real gaiety and joy of living.
This night the store was especially crowded because it was a Saturday and that meant early closing for all the hotels, except, of course, Smith's.So as the hotels were shut, the people were all in the drug store, drinking like fishes.It just shows the folly of Local Option and the Temperance Movement and all that.Why, if you shut the hotels you simply drive the people to the soda fountains and there's more drinking than ever, and not only of the men, too, but the girls and young boys and children.I've seen little things of eight and nine that had to be lifted up on the high stools at Eliot's drug store, drinking great goblets of lemon soda, enough to burst them--brought there by their own fathers, and why? Simply because the hotel bars were shut.
