The Champagne Standard.

by Mrs. John Lane.

_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 s.p.a.ce 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 unb.u.t.ton 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 b.u.t.tons, 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 sh.o.r.e'?" 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 sh.o.r.e,'" 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 was, as usual, triumphing over matter, and presto! before I knew what he was about, he had changed into an idea.

"To call you only a cat!" I cried in fervent grat.i.tude. "Only a cat, indeed! You are much more than a cat--you are a miracle! You are a preface!" And so, indeed, he was.

Like one inspired I thought of his first ill.u.s.trious ancestor, on four legs, the one who had once so heroically looked at a king, with the result that not only did he gain a perpetual permission for his race, but he has pa.s.sed into an immortal proverb. That was not his only glorious deed, however, for it was he who first encouraged the Modest.

If it had not been for that historic cat, what would have become of them! When the Modest want to say something, no matter how modestly, and get frightfully snubbed, don't they always declare that "A cat may look at a king"? Really, that ill.u.s.trious cat has never had his due! Besides heaps of other things, is he not the original type of the first true Republican? I would like to know what the world would have done if he hadn't looked at the king? Why, it was the first great Declaration of Independence.

Besides, don't we owe to him, though hitherto unacknowledged, those underlying principles of that other glorious Declaration of Independence, the happy result of which seems to be that tea is so awfully dear in America?

No, one doesn't hold with a cat's laughing at a king. No cat should laugh at a king, for that leads to anarchy and impoliteness and things going off. It is the cat who looks civilly at kings who has come to stay, along with republics and free thought. But possibly that is the one little drawback--thought is so dreadfully free! It used to be rather select to think, but now everybody thinks, and kings and other important things are not nearly as sacred as they used to be, and even the Modest get a chance. I suppose it is the spirit of the Age.

I had got so far and had to nibble again at my pencil for further inspiration, when the door opened and my landlady appeared. She is a worthy woman, and she holds her head on one side like an elderly canary-bird.

She spoke with a remnant of breath.

"If you please, ma'am, we have lost our Alonzo the Brave."

"You will probably," I replied with great presence of mind, considering that I had no idea what she was talking about, "find him with the fair Imogene."

Here my landlady, with her eyes penetrating the corners, gave a cry of rapture, "There he is! Glory be!" And she pounced on the black and purring stranger, who rose and stretched his back to a mountainous height and his jaws to a pink cavern.

"This is our Alonzo the Brave," and she pressed his rebellious head against the pins on her ample bosom.

"Oh, indeed," I said politely; "and though he is your Alonzo the Brave, I hope you won't mind his being my preface, will you? And may I ask what does he like best in the world besides Imogene?"

Alonzo the Brave had partly wriggled out of her ardent embrace, so that he now hung suspended by his elastic body, while his legs dangled at amazing length.

"Me," and my landlady simpered.

"I mean in the eating line," I explained.

Catnip, said his biographer, was his favourite weakness.

"Then get him a pennyworth of catnip and put it on my bill," I said benevolently. For I thought as she carried him off struggling, even a poor preface is cheap at a penny, and without Alonzo the Brave there would have been no preface, and without his heroic ancestor the Modest would never have had a chance!

I do hope this explains the following pages. I have not, like Alonzo's ancestor, strictly confined my observations to kings. I have, indeed, ventured to look at all sorts of things, many of them very sublime, and solemn and important, and some less so; and, as the following pages will prove, I have availed myself freely of the privilege of the Modest.

If the two greatest nations of the world have served me as "copy," it is because they are very near and dear, and the Modest, like more celebrated writers, have a way of using their nearest and dearest as "copy," especially their dearest.

In conclusion, I trust I have adequately explained, by help of Alonzo the Brave, that it is the privilege of the Modest to make observations about everything--whether anyone will ever read them, why--that's another matter.

A. E. L.

KEMPTOWN, January, 1906.

_The Champagne Standard_

The other evening at a charming dinner party in London, and in that intimate time which is just before the men return to the drawing room, I found myself tete-a-tete with my genial hostess. She leaned forward and said with a touch of anxiety in her pretty eyes, "Confess that I am heroic?"

"Why?" I asked, somewhat surprised.

"To give a dinner party without champagne."

It was only then that I realised that we had had excellent claret and hock instead of that fatal wine which represents, as really nothing else does, the cheap pretence which is so humorously characteristic of Modern Society.

"You see," she said with a deep sigh, "I have a conscience, and I try to reconcile a modest purse and the hospitality people expect from me, and that is being very heroic these days, and it does so disagree with me to be heroic! Besides, people don't appreciate your heroism, they only think you are mean!"

I realised at once the truth and absurdity of what she said. It does require tremendous heroism to have the courage of a small income and to be hospitable within your means, for by force of bad example hospitality grows dearer year by year. The increasing extravagance of life is all owing to those millionaires, and imitation millionaires, whose example is a curse and a menace. They set the pace, and the whole world tears after. Because solely of their wealth, or supposed wealth, they are accepted everywhere, and it is they who have broken down the once impa.s.sable barriers between the English cla.s.ses, with the result that the evil which before might have been confined to the highest, now that extravagant imitation is universal, permeates all ranks even to the lowest.