“What I want to know,” she said, “is this: Are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?”
There was no reply to her question and she did not expect one. She knew that only somebody very much wiser than Michael could give her the right answer. . .
Chapter Nine
JOHN AND BARBARA’S STORY
JANE AND MICHAEL had gone off to a party, wearing their best clothes and looking, as Ellen the housemaid said when she saw them, “just like a shop window.”
All the afternoon the house was very quiet and still, as though it were thinking its own thoughts, or dreaming perhaps.
Down in the kitchen Mrs Brill was reading the paper with her spectacles perched on her nose. Robertson Ay was sitting in the garden busily doing nothing. Mrs Banks was on the drawing-room sofa with her feet up. And the house stood very quietly around them all, dreaming its own dreams, or thinking perhaps.
Upstairs in the nursery Mary Poppins was airing the clothes by the fire, and the sunlight poured in at the window, flickering on the white walls, dancing over the cots where the babies were lying.
“I say, move over! You’re right in my eyes,” said John in a loud voice.
“Sorry!” said the sunlight. “But I can’t help it. I’ve got to get across this room somehow. Orders is orders. I must move from East to West in a day and my way lies through this Nursery. Sorry! Shut your eyes and you won’t notice me.”
The gold shaft of sunlight lengthened across the room. It was obviously moving as quickly as it could in order to oblige John.
“How soft, how sweet you are! I love you,” said Barbara, holding out her hands to its shining warmth.
“Good girl,” said the sunlight approvingly, and moved up over her cheeks and into her hair with a light, caressing movement. “Do you like the feel of me?” it said, as though it loved being praised.
“Dee-licious!” said Barbara, with a happy sigh.
“Chatter, chatter, chatter! I never heard such a place for chatter. There’s always somebody talking in this room,” said a shrill voice at the window.
John and Barbara looked up.
It was the Starling who lived on the top of the chimney.
“I like that,” said Mary Poppins, turning round quickly. “What about yourself? All day long – yes, and half the night, too, on the roofs and telegraph poles. Roaring and screaming and shouting – you’d talk the leg off a chair, you would. Worse than any sparrer, and that’s the truth.”
The Starling cocked his head on one side and looked down at her from his perch on the window frame.
“Well,” he said, “I have my business to attend to. Consultations, discussions, arguments, bargaining. And that, of course, necessitates a certain amount of – er – quiet conversation—”
“Quiet!” exclaimed John, laughing heartily.
“And I wasn’t talking to you, young man,” said the Starling, hopping down on to the window sill. “And you needn’t talk – anyway. I heard you for several hours on end last Saturday week. Goodness, I thought you’d never stop – you kept me awake all night.”
“That wasn’t talking,” said John. “I was—” He paused. “I mean, I had a pain.”
“Humph!” said the Starling, and hopped on to the railing of Barbara’s cot. He sidled along it until he came to the head of the cot. Then he said in a soft, wheedling voice:
“Well, Barbara B., anything for the old fellow today, eh?”
Barbara pulled herself into a sitting position by holding on to one of the bars of her cot.
“There’s the other half of my arrowroot biscuit,” she said, and held it out in her round, fat fist.
The Starling swooped down, plucked it out of her hand and flew back to the windowsill. He began nibbling it greedily.
“Thank you!” said Mary Poppins, meaningly, but the Starling was too busy eating to notice the rebuke.
“I said ‘Thank you!’” said Mary Poppins a little louder.
The Starling looked up.
“Eh – what? Oh, get along, girl, get along. I’ve no time for such frills and furbelows.” And he gobbled up all but the last crumbs of his biscuit.
The room was very quiet.
John, drowsing in the sunlight, put the toes of his right foot into his mouth and ran them along the place where his teeth were just beginning to come through.
“Why do you bother to do that?” said Barbara, in her soft, amused voice that seemed always to be full of laughter. “There’s nobody to see you.”
“I know,” said John, playing a tune on his toes. “But I like to keep in practice. It does so amuse the Grown-ups. Did you notice that Aunt Flossie nearly went mad with delight when I did it yesterday? ‘The Darling, the Clever, the Marvel, the Creature!’ – didn’t you hear her say all that?” And John threw his foot from him and roared with laughter as he thought of Aunt Flossie.
“She liked my trick, too,” said Barbara complacently. “I took off both my socks and she said I was so sweet she would like to eat me. Isn’t it funny – when I say I’d like to eat something I really mean it. Biscuits and Rusks and the knobs of beds and so on. But Grown-ups never mean what they say, it seems to me. She couldn’t have really wanted to eat me, could she?”
“No. It’s only the idiotic way they have of talking,” said John. “I don’t believe I’ll ever understand Grown-ups. They all seem so stupid. And even Jane and Michael are stupid sometimes.”
“Um,” agreed Barbara, thoughtfully pulling off her socks.
“For instance,” John went on, “they don’t understand a single thing we say. But, worse than that, they don’t understand what other things say. Why only last Monday I heard Jane remark that she wished she knew what language the Wind spoke.”
“I know,” said Barbara. “It’s astonishing. And Michael always insists – haven’t you heard him? – that the Starling says ‘Wee-Twe – ee – ee!’ He seems not to know that the Starling says nothing of the kind, but speaks exactly the same language as we do. Of course, one doesn’t expect Mother and Father to know about it – they don’t know anything, though they are such darlings – but you’d think Jane and Michael would—”
“They did once,” said Mary Poppins, folding up one of Jane’s nightgowns.
“What?” said John and Barbara together in very surprised voices. “Really? You mean they understood the Starling and the Wind and—”
“And what the trees say and the language of the sunlight and the stars – of course they did! Once,” said Mary Poppins.
“But – how is it that they’ve forgotten it all?” said John, wrinkling up his forehead and trying to understand.
“Aha!” said the Starling knowingly, looking up from the remains of his biscuit. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Because they’ve grown older,” explained Mary Poppins. “Barbara, put on your socks at once, please.”
“That’s a silly reason,” said John, looking sternly at her.
“It’s the true one, then,” Mary Poppins said, tying Barbara’s socks firmly round her ankles.