When the Kelveys were well out of sight of Burnells’, they sat down to rest on a big red drain-pipe by the side of the road. Lil’s cheeks were still burning; she took off the hat with the quill and held it on her knee. Dreamily they looked over the hay paddocks, past the creek, to the group of wattles where Logan’s cows stood waiting to be milked. What were their thoughts?
Presently our Else nudged up close to her sister. But now she had forgotten the cross lady. She put out a finger and stroked her sister’s quill; she smiled her rare smile.
“I seen the little lamp,” she said, softly.
Then both were silent once more.
Only an artist of Mansfield’s calibre could communicate this fluid transformation of redness from the drain pipe to the child’s blush, to the little lamp. We are held in some hypnotic moment where differences are elided and dream truth is privileged. The children’s trance like state allows them to temporarily escape the petty degradations of their poverty and this moment of communion between the two sisters is one of the most precious connections in Modernist Fiction. Like Monet, Mansfield has made her girls alive through fresh strokes of colour drenched in light: they have seen the lamp and that we feel is more than enough!
Sublime!