"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.