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THE CHAMPAGNE STANDARD

by

MRS. JOHN LANE

Author of "Kitwyk," "Brown's Retreat," etc.







London: John Lane, The Bodley Head
New York: John Lane Company
MDCCCCV

Copyright, 1905,
by John Lane Company

The Plimpton Press Norwood Mass. U.S.A.




    TO THE PUBLISHER
      MY GENIAL AND
    SUGGESTIVE CRITIC




_My Preface_


I was sitting alone with a lead-pencil, having a _tete-a-tete_ 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.

With a new sense of security I again studied him, and I observed a
subtle change. He was evidently a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde kind of cat. I
became conscious of a complex personality. Though to the careless
observer he might appear to be only a chubby cat, full of purr, to me he
was rapidly developing into something more; in fact, mind