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The Champagne Standard. John Mrs. Lane
Читать онлайн.Название The Champagne Standard
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isbn 4064066186463
Автор произведения John Mrs. Lane
Жанр Языкознание
Издательство Bookwire
John Mrs. Lane
The Champagne Standard
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4064066186463
Table of Contents
American Wives and English Housekeeping
The Extravagant Economy of Women
My Preface
I was sitting alone with a lead-pencil, having a tête-à-tête with a sheet of paper. A brisk fire burned on the hearth, and through the beating of the rain against the little, curved Georgian windows I could hear the monotonous roll of the sea at the foot of the narrow street, and the tear and crunching of the pebbles down the shingle as the waves receded.
I had been ordered to write a preface to explain the liberty I had taken in making miscellaneous observations about two great nations, and then putting a climax to my effrontery by having them printed. So here I was trying, with the aid of a lead-pencil and a sheet of paper, to construct a preface, and that without the ghost of an idea how to begin. Nor was the dim electric light illuminating; nor, in the narrow street, the nasal invocation of an aged man with a green shade over his eyes, arm in arm with an aged woman keenly alive to pennies, somewhere out of whose interiors there emanated a song to the words, "Glowry, glowry, hallaluh!"
In fact, all the ideas that did occur to me were miles away from a preface. It was maddening! I even demanded that the ocean should stop making such a horrid noise, if only for five minutes. And that set me idly to thinking what would happen to the world if the tides should really be struck motionless even for that short space of time. The idea is so out of my line that it is quite at the service of any distressed romancer, dashed with science, who, also, may be nibbling his pencil.
I sat steeped in that profound melancholy familiar to authors who are required to say something and who have nothing to say. Finally, in a despair which is familiar to such as have seen the first act of Faust, I invoked that Supernatural Power who comes with a red light and bestows inspiration.
"If you'll only help me to begin," I cried, "I'll do the rest!" For I realised in what active demand his services must be.
I didn't believe anything would happen. Nothing ever does except in the first act of Faust, and I must really take this opportunity to beg Faust not to unbutton his old age so obviously. Still, that again has nothing to do with my preface!
I reclined on a red plush couch before the fire and thought gloomily of Faust's buttons, and how the supernatural never comes to one's aid these material days, when my eyes, following the elegant outlines of the couch, strayed to a red plush chair at its foot, strangely and supernaturally out of place. And how can I describe my amazement and terror when I saw on that red plush chair a big black cat, with his tail neatly curled about his toes! A strange black cat where no cat had ever been seen before! He stared at me, and I stared at him. Was he the Rapid Reply of that Supernatural Power I had so rashly invoked? At the mere thought I turned cold.
"Are you a message 'from the night's Plutonian shore'?" I said, trembling, "or do you belong to the landlady?"
His reply was merely to blink, and indeed he was so black and the background was so black that but for his blink I shouldn't have known he was there.
"If," I murmured, "he recognises quotations from The Raven, it will be a sign that he is going to stay forever." Whereupon I declaimed all the shivery bits of that immortal poem, which I had received as a Christmas present.
He was so far from being agitated that before I had finished he had settled down in a cosy heap, with his fore-paws tucked under his black shirt front, and was fast asleep, delivering himself of the emotional purr of a tea kettle in full operation. For a moment I was appalled. Was this new and stodgy edition of The Raven going to stay forever?
"'Get thee back into the tempest and the night's Plutonian shore,'" I urged, but all he did was to open one lazy eye, and wink. For a moment I was frozen with horror. Was I doomed to live forever in the society of a strange black cat, of possibly supernatural antecedents?
"'Take thy form from off my door,'" I was about to address him, but paused, for, strictly speaking, he was not on my door. And just as I was quite faint with apprehension, common-sense, which does not usually come to the aid of ladies in distress, came to mine. Like a flash it came to me that even if he stayed forever, I needn't. I had only taken the lodgings by the week. He was foiled.
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