Our Venetian Lamp

IT was made in the fashion of the lamps of Saint Mark’s, a flat disk of bronze openwork holding a cup of dull red glass for olive oil, with a pineapple-shaped pendant below, all hung by wrought bronze chains. When we looked at it first, it seemed as if it would bring into our New England home something of the dim glory of the old cathedral, glowing faintly, like the inside of some ancient jewel, with the clear small light of its sacred lamps just breaking its lasting twilight. Doubtless we thought, too, of the impression that it would make upon our village, which has newly awakened to a sense of the æsthetic. There were a few dollars left after purchasing, in a little shop behind the cathedral, the lace doylies which have lately caused so deep a sensation among our neighbors, and we eagerly purchased the bronze lamp. Our vote, made up of two voices, is almost never a tie.

It was a curious walk that we took to get it, along the side of green canals, over miniature carved bridges, led by the undying charm of Old Venice: not the Venice of the Grand Canal, overrun by foreign folk, desecrated by steamboats, but the ancient city, whose sequestered life still goes on in her piazzette and in tiny shops peeping out from under darkbrowed houses. To her belong whitehaired cobblers, busily tapping in their tiny spaces six feet by five; brown, wrinkled, ageless dames guarding tiny stores of peaches, cherries, plums, in almost imperceptible markets. It seemed to us, as we bargained for the lamp in a dusky little shop all agleam with bronze and things of brass, that a glimpse of it would at any moment summon before us the beauty of fading colors and fretted outlines in this city of the sea.

How we packed it, with its chains, the curving, bulky pendant, so beautiful when hanging from the ceiling, so impossible in a trunk; how it wrinkled our garments and made holes in them, I leave to the imagination of the reader. All seemed of small account when we saw it hanging in our hall, where it lent, we thought, a grace of other worlds and earlier days — though it was palpably new — to a rigid American stairway, and a wall-paper a bit antique without being therefore lovely. It gave an air of permanence to the place, even to the oaken coat-hanger which had been put up by feminine hands and which invariably came down with the coat. What, though our fingers were often sticky with olive oil, as we dived vainly with a pair of inadequate tin pincers for the floating wicks that would not float? A dimly red, religious light pervaded our hall, and, if we tried hard enough, it transported us to Venice.

The dim light had its disadvantages, nor did it always lead caller or hostess into a religious mood. Incoming and outgoing guests sometimes collided, and it fostered in us an already marked tendency to call people by wrong names. Sometimes it ’went out altogether, and our friends stepped from our lighted sitting-room into total darkness, kicked our little mahogany table, and ran into the umbrella stand. The climax of trouble, however, came in the insane tendency developed by all comers to run into our lamp. No June bug is more persistent in bumping into electric-light bulbs than were one and all in heading for our sacred flame; and lard oil — for olive oil had been pronounced too expensive, and we never let our æsthetic longings betray us into rashness in our village — dropped upon more than one head, more than one hat. The clergyman went all too near, and drops of oil not sacred fell upon his head; an editor — and we esteem editors not less than clergymen — bore away unsightly drippings upon a silk hat too gallantly waved; young girls who were calling developed unexpected statures, — we could have sworn when it was hung that our lamp swung higher than any human head. This thing of bronze seemed to grow sensitive, vibrated to impassioned farewells, and spilled over, as our girl friends sometimes did. Yet we toiled over it gladly, —though wicks floated to the bottom, and matches broke and tumbled in, and the silly pincers would not work. Our maid, possibly because she was a Scotch Presbyterian, sternly refused to have anything to do with the object, except once when we found her secretly engaged with it in the kitchen: she had scoured all the manufactured look of age away from it with sapolio.

Then little Tommy came to spend a few days with us. I can see him now, with his golden curls, white suit, and Roman silk stockings, as he stood upon the stairs and swung the pretty lamp and laughed aloud. A new stair carpet was the result. Tommy went away, and we returned to the quiet of our little home, and to our sacred gloom, which was now partly of the mind. We had grown a bit nervous in our musings; our low questions, — “Does n’t it fairly make you see the green water in the canals?” or, “Can’t you hear the gondolas gliding along ?" — were likely to be interrupted by a shriek: “Is that thing spilling over?”

The crowning achievement of our Venetian lamp came one July night when we were awaiting two distinguished guests. It was burning softly, enveloping our whole cottage in an artistic atmosphere, and we congratulated ourselves, as we walked up and down in fresh white gowns, on how greatly our distinguished guests would appreciate it. The house was spotless: did we not always try to keep it so? But was an added touch of polish too much for such visitors ?

At 9.30 we remembered that the mattress for the cot must be brought downstairs, our house — alas that I must confess the secrets of our housekeeping! — having, in reality, room for but one distinguished guest, it being thus necessary for one hostess to sleep in the library. The maid, like a sensible woman, had gone to bed; had she been awake she would have saved us from this, as from many another folly. A brilliant idea occurred to us, for we are as fertile in inventive processes as the Swiss Family Robinson or Robinson Crusoe, though our devices do not always work out with that automatic regularity to the advantage of the planner. The mattress, neatly curled, should roll downstairs. What is intelligence for, if not to save trouble? We started it; it leaped, sprang like a sentient thing, turned a somersault, stood upright, flung itself upon the lamp, which, as if touched to life, responded to the challenge, vital energy quivering along its speaking chains. And now ensued a mortal combat, to which only the pen of a Victor Hugo could do justice. It was such a fight as would have occurred if his memorable runaway cannon had indeed gone overboard into the water and there had encountered the octopus of The Toilers of the Sea. Tentacles leaped out from the lamp; the mattress hit back with all the power of its uncoiled strength; the swinging bronze bulb responded with a blow, pouring out — alas, no dragon of fairy story could hurl forth from its throat anything worse than lard oil!

The distinguished guests arrived at this moment to find floor, ceiling, mattress, stairs, bespattered with oil. Villainous wicks from that villainous receptacle were lodged upon our best umbrellas, and even upon the backs of our necks, and greasy fragments of red glass were flung as far as the middle of the diningroom floor and out upon the walk.

It was after the distinguished guests were gone, after the kalsominers and the carpet-man had finished, that we took our Venetian lamp and a gardening trowel and went to the far corner of our green yard, where already many precious things lie buried. There we dug a hole. There the Venetian lamp lies buried, by Fluff, who died in the prime of cathood, by her two kittens, who perished at five days old, by the baby bluebird that Rex caught, and by the squirrel, brought home from a snowbank, wounded to the death, to fade away upon our hands. Some future investigator, thousands of years hence, may dig it up, and exclaim over the beauty of taste of the aborigines. Perhaps he can afford æsthetic sensations; we cannot.