Kitabı oku: «Mary Poppins in the Park»

Chapter One EVERY GOOSE A SWAN

THE SUMMER DAY was hot and still. The Cherry-Trees that bordered the Lane could feel their cherries ripening – the green slowly turning to yellow and the yellow blushing red.

The houses dozed in the dusty gardens with their shutters over their eyes. “Do not disturb us!” they seemed to say. “We rest in the afternoon.”

And the starlings hid themselves in the chimneys with their heads under their wings.

Over the Park lay a cloud of sunlight as thick and as golden as syrup. No wind stirred the heavy leaves. The flowers stood up, very still and shiny, as though they were made of metal.

Down by the Lake the benches were empty. The people who usually sat there had gone home out of the heat. Neleus, the little marble statue, looked down at the placid water. No goldfish flirted a scarlet tail. They were all sitting under the lily-leaves – using them as umbrellas.

The lawns spread out like a green carpet, motionless in the sunlight. Except for a single, rhythmic movement, you might have thought that the whole Park was only a painted picture. To and fro, by the big magnolia, the Park Keeper was spearing up rubbish and putting it into a litter-basket.

He stopped his work and looked up as two dogs trotted by.

They had come from Cherry Tree Lane, he knew, for Miss Lark was calling from behind her shutters.

“Andrew! Willoughby! Please come back! Don’t go swimming in that dirty Lake. I’ll make you some Iced Tea!”

Andrew and Willoughby looked at each other, winked, and trotted on. But as they passed the big magnolia, they started and pulled up sharply. Down they flopped on the grass, panting – with their pink tongues lolling out.

Mary Poppins, neat and prim in her blue skirt and a new hat trimmed with a crimson tulip, looked at them over her knitting. She was sitting bolt upright against the tree, with a plaid rug spread on the lawn around her. Her handbag sat tidily by her side. And above her, from a flowering branch, the parrot umbrella dangled.

She glanced at the two thumping tails and gave a little sniff.

“Put in your tongues and sit up straight! You are not a pair of wolves.”

The two dogs sprang at once to attention. And Jane, lying on the lawn, could see they were doing their very best to put their tongues in their cheeks.

“And remember, if you’re going swimming,” Mary Poppins continued, “to shake yourselves when you come out. Don’t come sprinkling us!”

Andrew and Willoughby looked reproachful.

“As though, Mary Poppins,” they seemed to say, “we would dream of such a thing!”

“All right, then. Be off with you!” And they sped away like shots from a gun.

“Come back!” Miss Lark cried anxiously.

But nobody took any notice.

“Why can’t I swim in the Park Lake?” asked Michael in a smothered voice. He was lying face downwards in the grass, watching a family of ants.

“You’re not a dog!” Mary Poppins reminded him.

“I know, Mary Poppins. But if I were—” Was she smiling or not? He couldn’t be sure, with his nose pressed into the earth.

“Well – what would you do?” she enquired, with a sniff.

He wanted to say that if he were a dog he would do just as he liked – swim or not, as the mood took him, without asking leave of anyone. But what if her face was looking fierce? Silence was best, he decided.

“Nothing!” he said, in a meek voice. “It’s too hot to argue, Mary Poppins!”

“Out of nothing comes nothing!” She tossed her head in its tulip hat. “And I’m not arguing, I’m talking!” She was having the last word, as usual.

The sunlight caught her knitting-needles as it shone through the broad magnolia leaves on the little group below. John and Barbara, leaning their heads on each other’s shoulders, were dozing and waking, waking and dozing. Annabel was fast asleep in Mary Poppins’ shadow. Light and darkness dappled them all and splotched the face of the Park Keeper as he dived at a piece of newspaper.

“All Litter to be placed in the Baskets! Obey the Rules!” he said sternly.

Mary Poppins looked him up and down. Her glance would have withered an oak-tree.

“That’s not my litter,” she retorted.

“Oh?” he said disbelievingly.

“No!” she replied, with a virtuous snort.

“Well, someone must ’ave put it there. It doesn’t grow – like roses!”

He pushed his cap to the back of his head and mopped behind his ears. What with the heat, and her tone of voice, he was feeling quite depressed.

“’Ot weather we’re ’avin’!” he remarked, eyeing her nervously. He looked like an eager, lonely dog.

“That’s what we expect in the middle of summer!” Her knitting-needles clicked.

The Park Keeper sighed and tried again.

“I see you brought yer parrot!” he said, glancing up at the black silk shape that hung among the leaves.

“You mean my parrot-headed umbrella,” she haughtily corrected him.

He gave a little anxious laugh. “You don’t think it’s going to rain, do you? With all this sun about?”

“I don’t think, I know,” she told him calmly. “And if I,” she went on, “were a Park Keeper, I wouldn’t be wasting half the day like some people I could mention! There’s a piece of orange peel over there – why don’t you pick it up?”

She pointed with her knitting-needle and kept it pointing accusingly while he speared up the offending litter and tossed it into a basket.

“If she was me,” he said to himself, “there’d be no Park at all. Only a nice tidy desert!” He fanned his face with his cap.

“And anyway,” he said aloud, “it’s no fault of mine I’m a Park Keeper. I should ’ave been a Nexplorer by rights, away in foreign parts. If I’d ’ad me way I wouldn’t be ’ere. I’d be sittin’ on a piece of ice along with a Polar Bear!”

He sighed and leant upon his stick, falling into a daydream.

“Humph!” said Mary Poppins loudly. And a startled dove in the tree above her ruffled its wing in surprise.

A feather came slowly drifting down. Jane stretched out her hand and caught it.

“How deliciously it tickles!” she murmured, running the grey edge over her nose. Then she tucked the feather above her brow and bound her ribbon round it.

“I’m the daughter of an Indian Chief. Minnehaha, Laughing Water, gliding along the river.”

“Oh, no, you’re not,” contradicted Michael. “You’re Jane Caroline Banks.”

“That’s only my outside,” she insisted. “Inside I’m somebody quite different. It’s a very funny feeling.”

“You should have eaten a bigger lunch. Then you wouldn’t have funny feelings. And Daddy’s not an Indian Chief, so you can’t be Minnehaha!”

He gave a sudden start as he spoke and peered more closely into the grass.

“There he goes!” he shouted wildly, wriggling forward on his stomach and thumping his toes.

“I’ll thank you, Michael,” said Mary Poppins, “to stop kicking my shins. What are you – a Performing Horse?”

“Not a horse, a hunter, Mary Poppins! I’m tracking in the jungle!”

“Jungles!” scoffed the Park Keeper. “My vote is for snowy wastes!”

“If you’re not careful, Michael Banks, you’ll be tracking home to bed. I never knew such a silly pair. And you’re the third,” snapped Mary Poppins, eyeing the Park Keeper. “Always wanting to be something else instead of what you are. If it’s not Miss Minne-what’s-her-name, it’s this or that or the other. You’re as bad as the Goose-girl and the Swineherd!”

“But it isn’t geese or swine I’m after. It’s a lion, Mary Poppins. He may be only an ant on the outside but inside – ah, at last, I’ve got him! – inside he’s a man-eater!”

Michael rolled over, red in the face, holding something small and black between his finger and thumb.

“Jane,” he began in an eager voice. But the sentence was never finished. For Jane was making signs to him, and as he turned to Mary Poppins he understood their meaning.

Her knitting had fallen on the rug and her hands lay folded in her lap. She was looking at something far away, beyond the Lane, beyond the Park, perhaps beyond the horizon.

Carefully, so as not to disturb her, the children crept to her side. The Park Keeper plumped himself down on the rug and stared at her, goggle-eyed.

“Yes, Mary Poppins?” prompted Jane. “The Goose-girl – tell us about her!”

Michael pressed against her skirt and waited expectantly. He could feel her legs, bony and strong, beneath the cool blue linen.

From under the shadow of her hat she glanced at them for a short moment and looked away again.

“Well, there she sat,” she began gravely, speaking in the soft accents that were so unlike her usual voice.

“There she sat, day after day, amid her flock of geese, braiding her hair and unbraiding it for lack of something to do. Sometimes she would pick a fern and wave it before her like a fan, the way the Lord Chancellor’s wife might do, or even the Queen, maybe.

“Or again, she would weave a necklace of flowers and go to the brook to admire it. And every time she did that she noticed that her eyes were blue – bluer than any periwinkle – and her cheeks like the breast of a robin. As for her mouth – not to mention her nose! – her opinion of these was so high she had no words fit to describe them.”

“She sounds like you, Mary Poppins,” said Michael. “So terribly pleased with herself!”

Her glance came darting from the horizon and flickered at him fiercely.

“I mean, Mary Poppins—” he began to stammer. Had he broken the thread of the story?

“I mean,” he went on flatteringly, “you’ve got pink cheeks and blue eyes too. Like lollipops and bluebells.”

A slow smile of satisfaction melted her angry look, and Michael gave a sigh of relief as she took up the tale again.

Well, she went on, there was the brook, and there was the Goose-girl’s reflection. And each time she looked at it she was sorry for everyone in the world who was missing such a spectacle. And she pitied in particular the handsome Swineherd who herded his flock on the other side of the stream.

“If only,” she thought lamentingly, “I were not the person I am! If I were merely what I seem, I could then invite him over. But since I am something more than a goose-girl, it would not be right or proper.”

And reluctantly she turned her back and looked in the other direction.

She would have been surprised, perhaps, had she known what the Swineherd was thinking.

He too, for lack of a looking-glass, made use of the little river. And when it reflected his dark curls, and the curve of his chin and his well-shaped ears, he grieved for the whole human race, thinking of all it was missing. And especially he grieved for the Goose-girl.

“Undoubtedly,” he told himself, “she is dying of loneliness – sitting there in her shabby dress, braiding her yellow hair. It is very pretty hair too, and – but for the fact that I am who I am – I would willingly speak a word to her and while away the time.”

And reluctantly he turned his back and looked in the other direction.

What a coincidence, you will say! But there’s more to the story than that. Not only the Goose-girl and the Swineherd, but every creature in that place was thinking the same thoughts.

The geese, as they nibbled the buttercups and flattened the grass into star-like shapes, were convinced – and they made no secret of it – they were something more than geese.

And the swine would have laughed at any suggestion that they were merely pigs.

And so it was with the grey Ass who pulled the Swineherd’s cart to market; and the Toad who lived beside the stream, under one of the stepping-stones; and the barefoot Boy with the Toy Monkey who played on the bridge every day.

Each believed that his real self was infinitely greater and grander than the one to be seen with the naked eye.

Around his little shaggy body, the Ass was confident, a lordlier, finer, sleeker shape kicked its hooves in the daisies.

To the Toad, however, his true self was smaller than his outward shape, and very gay and green. He would gaze for hours at his reflection, but, ugly as it truly was, the sight never depressed him.

“That’s only my outside,” he would say, nodding at his wrinkled skin and yellow bulging eyes. But he kept his outside out of sight when the Boy was on the bridge. For he dreaded the curses that greeted him if he showed as much as a toe.

“Heave to!” the ferocious voice would cry. “Enemy sighted to starboard! A bottle of rum and a new dagger to the man who rips him apart!”

For the Boy was something more than a boy – as you’ll probably have guessed. Inside, he knew the Straits of Magellan as you know the nose on your face. Honest mariners paled at his fame, his deeds were a byword in seven seas. He could sack a dozen ships in a morning and bury the treasure so cleverly that even he could not find it.

To a passer-by it might have seemed that the Boy had two good eyes. But in his own private opinion, he was only possessed of one. He had lost the other in a hand-to-hand fight somewhere off Gibraltar. His everyday name always made him smile when people called him by it. “If they knew who I really am,” he would say, “they wouldn’t look so cheerful!”

As for the Monkey, he believed he was nothing like a monkey.

“This old fur coat,” he assured himself, “is simply to keep me warm. And I swing by my tail for the fun of it, not because I must.”

Well, there they all were, one afternoon, full of their fine ideas. The sun spread over them like a fan, very warm and cosy. The meadow flowers hung on their stems, bright as newly-washed china. Up in the sky the larks were singing – on and on, song without end, as though they were all wound up.

The Goose-girl sat among her geese, the Swineherd with his swine. The Ass in his field, and the Toad in his hole, were nodding sleepily. And the Boy and his Monkey lolled on the bridge discussing their further plans for bloodshed.

Suddenly the Ass snorted and his ear gave a questioning twitch. Larks were above and the brook beneath, but he heard among these daily sounds the echo of a footstep.

Along the path that led to the stream a ragged man was lounging. His tattered clothes were so old that you couldn’t find one bit of them that wasn’t tied with string. The brim of his hat framed a face that was rosy and mild in the sunlight, and through the brim his hair stuck up in tufts of grey and silver. His steps were alternately light and heavy, for one foot wore an old boot and the other a bedroom slipper. You would have to look for a long time to find a shabbier man.

But his shabbiness seemed not to trouble him – indeed he appeared to enjoy it. For he wandered along contentedly, eating a crust and a pickled onion and whistling between mouthfuls. Then he spied the group in the meadow, and stared, and his tune broke off in the middle.

“A beautiful day!” he said politely, plucking the hat-brim from his head and bowing to the Goose-girl.

She gave him a haughty, tossing glance, but the Tramp did not seem to notice it.

“You two been quarrelling?” he asked, jerking his head at the Swineherd.

The Goose-girl laughed indignantly. “Quarrelling? What a silly remark! Why, I do not even know him!”

“Well,” said the Tramp, with a cheerful smile, “would you like me to introduce you?”

“Certainly not!” She flung up her head. “How could I associate with a Swineherd? I’m a princess in disguise.”

“Indeed?” said the Tramp, looking very surprised. “If that is the case, I must not detain you. I expect you want to be back at the Palace, getting on with your work.”

“Work? What work?” The Goose-girl stared.

It was now her turn to look surprised. Surely princesses sat upon cushions, with slaves to perform their least command.

“Why, spinning and weaving. And etiquette! Practising patience and cheerfulness while unsuitable suitors beg for your hand. Trying to look as if you liked it when you hear, for the hundred-thousandth time, the King’s three silly riddles! Not many princesses – as you must know – have leisure to sit all day in the sun among a handful of geese!”

“But what about wearing a pearly crown? And dancing till dawn with the Sultan’s son?”

“Dancing? Pearls? Oh, my! Oh, my!” A burst of laughter broke from the Tramp, as he took from his sleeve a piece of sausage.

“Those crowns are as heavy as lead or iron. You’d have a ridge in your head in no time. And a princess’s duty – surely you know? – is to dance with her father’s old friends first. Then the Lord Chamberlain. Then the Lord Chancellor. And, of course, the Keeper of the Seal. By the time you get round to the Sultan’s son, it’s late and he’s had to go home.”

The Goose-girl pondered the Tramp’s words. Could he really be speaking the truth? All the goose-girls in all the stories were princesses in disguise. But oh, how difficult it sounded! What did one say to Lord Chamberlains? “Come here!” “Go there!” as one would to a goose? Spinning and weaving! Etiquette!

Perhaps, taking everything into account, it might be better, the Goose-girl thought, simply to be a goose-girl.

“Well, away to the Palace!” the Tramp advised her. “You’re wasting your time sitting here, you know! Don’t you agree?” he called to the Swineherd, who was listening from his side of the stream.

“Agree with what?” said the Swineherd quickly, as though he hadn’t heard a word. “I never concern myself with goose-girls,” he added untruthfully. “It would not be fitting or suitable. I am a prince in disguise!”

“You are?” cried the Tramp admiringly. “Then you’re occupying your time, I suppose, in getting up muscle to fight the Dragon.”

The Swineherd’s damask cheek grew pale. “What dragon?” he asked in a stifled voice.

“Oh, any that you chance to meet. All princes, as you yourself must know, have to fight at least one dragon. That is what princes are for.”