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 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 gratitude. "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 illustrious 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 passed 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 illustrious 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.