But it's a hard thing to commit suicide on.
You can't.
You feel so buoyant.
Anyway, what with the phizzing of the seltzer and the lights and the
girls, Pupkin began to feel so fine that he didn't care a cuss for all
the Browning in the world, and as for the poet--oh, to blazes with him!
What's poetry, anyway?--only rhymes.
So, would you believe it, in about ten minutes Peter Pupkin was off
again and heading straight for the Pepperleighs' house, poet or no poet,
and, what was more to the point, he carried with him three great bricks
of Eliot's ice cream--in green, pink and brown layers. He struck the
verandah just at the moment when Browning was getting too stale
and dreary for words. His brain was all sizzling and jolly with the
bromo-seltzer, and when he fetched out the ice cream bricks and Zena
ran to get plates and spoons to eat it with, and Pupkin went with her
to help fetch them and they picked out the spoons together, they were so
laughing and happy that it was just a marvel. Girls, you know, need no
bromo-seltzer. They're full of it all the time.
And as for the poet--well, can you imagine how Pupkin felt when Zena
told him that the poet was married, and that the tubby little woman with
her head on sideways was his wife?
So they had the ice cream, and the poet ate it in bucketsful. Poets
always do. They need it. And after it the poet recited some stanzas of
his own and Pupkin saw that he had misjudged the man, because it was
dandy poetry, the very best. That night Pupkin walked home on air and
there was no thought of chloroform, and it turned out that he hadn't
committed suicide, but like all lovers he had commuted it.
I don't need to describe in full the later suicides of Mr. Pupkin,
because they were all conducted on the same plan and rested on something
the same reasons as above.
Sometimes he would go down at night to the offices of the bank below
his bedroom and bring up his bank revolver in order to make an end of
himself with it. This, too, he could see headed up in the newspapers as: