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: