Одноэтажная Америка / Little Golden America

Where are we? In the state of New Mexico? Faster, faster! The young chauffeur steps on the throttle, Carlsbad, Lordsburg, Las Cruces! The machine fills with noisy wind, and in it the passengers, slumbering in their easy-chairs, suddenly hear the great melody of the American continent.

America is located on a large automobile highway.

When we shut our eyes and try to resurrect in memory the country in which we spent four months, we see before us not Washington with its gardens, columns, and a full collection of monuments, not New York with its skyscrapers, its poverty and its wealth, not San Francisco, with its steep streets and suspension bridges, not hills, not factories, not canyons, but the crossing of two roads and a petrol station against the background of telegraph wires and advertising bill-boards.

11.В The Small Town

WE STOPPED in a small town and dined in a drug-store.

It is necessary to explain here the nature of a small American town, and what sort of drug-store it is in which one may dine.

When America’s big business men, in search of profit, directed their attention to the drug business, they were first of all curious to find out what pharmacists were really doing behind their partitions.

What were they grinding there with their pestles in those thick china mortars, while frowning importantly? Was it medicines? Well, now, how many medicines are there in the world? Let’s say fifty – a hundred – well, a hundred and twenty at the most! A hundred and twenty febrifugal, stimulant, or sedative medicines! Why then prepare them in an amateurish way in drug-stores? They should be produced in mass quantity in factories.

The fact that medicines began to be prepared in factories didn’t make it any easier for the sick man – the medicines were no cheaper.

To recoup their lost incomes the outsmarted pharmacists began to sell ice-cream, thirst-quenching waters, small notions, toys, cigarettes, kitchen utensils – in a word, they went in for anything at all.

And so the present-day American drug-store is a large bar with a high counter and revolving grand piano stools before it.