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.
What's the use of thinking you can stop people drinking merely by
cutting off whiskey and brandy? The only effect is to drive them to
taking lemon sour and sarsaparilla and cherry pectoral and caroka
cordial and things they wouldn't have touched before. So in the long run
they drink more than ever. The point is that you can't prevent people
having a good time, no matter how hard you try. If they can't have it
with lager beer and brandy, they'll have it with plain soda and lemon
pop, and so the whole gloomy scheme of the temperance people breaks
down, anyway.
But I was only saying that Eliot's drug store in Mariposa on a Saturday
night is the gayest and brightest spot in the world.
And just imagine what a fool of a place to commit suicide in!
Just imagine going up to the soda-water fountain and asking for five
cents' worth of chloroform and soda! Well, you simply can't, that's all.
That's the way Pupkin found it. You see, as soon as he came in, somebody
called out: "Hello, Pete!" and one or two others called: "Hullo, Pup!"
and some said: "How goes it?" and others: "How are you toughing it?"
and so on, because you see they had all been drinking more or less and
naturally they felt jolly and glad-hearted.
So the upshot of it was that instead of taking chloroform, Pupkin
stepped up to the counter of the fountain and he had a bromo-seltzer
with cherry soda, and after that he had one of those aerated seltzers,
and then a couple of lemon seltzers and a bromo-phizzer.