P. Travers: Mary Poppins in the Park

"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 with 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 Minnie-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 to 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 the 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.