I see,” said Jane, staring and staring.
And they were right. The shop was not there. It had entirely disappeared.
“How odd!” said Jane.
“Isn’t it?” said Michael. “But the Gingerbread is very good.”
And they were so busy biting their Gingerbread into different shapes – a man, a flower, a teapot – that they quite forgot how very odd it was.
They remembered it again at night, however, when the lights were out and they were both supposed to be sound asleep.
“Jane, Jane!” whispered Michael. “I hear someone tip-toeing on the stairs – listen!”
“Sssh!” hissed Jane from her bed, for she, too, had heard the footsteps.
Presently the door opened with a little click and somebody came into the room. It was Mary Poppins, dressed in hat and coat all ready to go out.
She moved about the room softly with quick secret movements. Jane and Michael watched her through half-closed eyes without stirring.
First she went to the chest of drawers, opened a drawer and shut it again after a moment. Then, on tip-toe, she went to the wardrobe, opened it, bent down and put something in or took something out (they couldn’t tell which). Snap! The wardrobe door shut quickly and Mary Poppins hurried from the room.
Michael sat up in bed.
“What was she doing?” he said to Jane in a loud whisper.
“I don’t know. Perhaps she’d forgotten her gloves or her shoes or – ” Jane broke off suddenly.
“Michael, listen!”
He listened. From down below – in the garden, it seemed – they could hear several voices whispering together, very earnestly and excitedly.
With a quick movement Jane got out of bed and beckoned Michael. They crept on bare feet to the window and looked down.
There, outside in the Lane, stood a tiny form and two gigantic figures.
“Mrs Corry and Miss Fannie and Miss Annie,” said Jane in a whisper.
And so indeed it was. It was a curious group. Mrs Corry was looking through the bars of the gate of Number Seventeen, Miss Fannie had two long ladders balanced on one huge shoulder, while Miss Annie appeared to be carrying in one hand a large pail of something that looked like glue and in the other an enormous paint-brush.
From where they stood, hidden by the curtain, Jane and Michael could distinctly hear their voices.
“She’s late!” Mrs Corry was saying crossly and anxiously.
“Perhaps,” Miss Fannie began timidly, settling the ladders more firmly on her shoulder, “one of the children is ill and she couldn’t – ”
“Get away in time,” said Miss Annie, nervously completing her sister’s sentence.
“Silence!” said Mrs Corry fiercely, and Jane and Michael distinctly heard her whisper something about “great galumphing* giraffes,” and they knew she was referring to her unfortunate daughters.
“Hist!*” said Mrs Corry suddenly, listening with her head on one side, like a small bird.
There was the sound of the front door being quietly opened and shut again, and the creak of footsteps on the path. Mrs Corry smiled and waved her hand as Mary Poppins came to meet them, carrying a market basket on her arm, and in the basket was something that seemed to give out a faint, mysterious light.
“Come along, come along, we must hurry! We haven’t much time,” said Mrs Corry, taking Mary Poppins by the arm. “Look lively,* you two!” And she moved off, followed by Miss Fannie and Miss Annie, who were obviously trying to look as lively as possible but not succeeding very well. They tramped heavily after their Mother and Mary Poppins, bending under their loads.
Jane and Michael saw all four of them go down Cherry-Tree Lane, and then they turned a little to the left and went up the hill. When they got to the top of the hill, where there were no houses but only grass and clover, they stopped.
Miss Annie put down her pail of glue, and Miss Fannie swung the ladders from her shoulder and steadied them until both stood in an upright position. Then she held one and Miss Annie the other.
“What on earth are they going to do?” said Michael, gaping.
But there was no need for Jane to reply, for he could see for himself what was happening.
As soon as Miss Fannie and Miss Annie had so fixed the ladders that they seemed to be standing with one end on the earth and the other leaning on the sky, Mrs Corry picked up her skirts and the paint-brush in one hand and the pail of glue in the other. Then she set her foot on the lowest rung of one of the ladders and began to climb it. Mary Poppins carrying her basket, climbed the other.
Then Jane and Michael saw a most amazing sight. As soon as she arrived at the top of her ladder, Mrs Corry dipped her brush into the glue and began slapping the sticky substance against the sky. And Mary Poppins, when this had been done, took something shiny from her basket and fixed it to the glue. When she took her hand away they saw that she was sticking the Gingerbread Stars to the sky. As each one was placed in position it began to twinkle furiously, sending out rays of sparkling golden light.
“They’re ours!” said Michael breathlessly. “They’re our stars. She thought we were asleep and came in and took them!”
But Jane was silent. She was watching Mrs Corry splashing the glue on the sky and Mary Poppins sticking on the stars and Miss Fannie and Miss Annie moving the ladders to a new position as the spaces in the sky became filled up.
At last it was over. Mary Poppins shook out her basket and showed Mrs Corry that there was nothing left in it. Then they came down from the ladders and the procession started down the hill again, Miss Fannie shouldering the ladders, Miss Annie jangling her empty pail of glue. At the corner they stood talking for a moment; then Mary Poppins shook hands with them all and hurried up the Lane again. Mrs Corry, dancing lightly in her elastic-sided boots and holding her skirts daintily with her hands, disappeared in the other direction with her huge daughters stumping noisily behind her.
The garden-gate clicked. Footsteps creaked on the path. The front door opened and shut with a soft clanging sound. Presently they heard Mary Poppins come quietly up the stairs, tip-toe past the nursery and go on into the room where she slept with John and Barbara.
As the sound of her footsteps died away, Jane and Michael looked at each other. Then without a word they went together to the top left-hand drawer and looked.
There was nothing there but a pile of Jane’s handkerchiefs.
“I told you so,” said Michael.
Next they went to the wardrobe and looked into the shoe-box. It was empty.
“But how? But why?” said Michael, sitting down on the edge of his bed and staring at Jane.
Jane said nothing. She just sat beside him with her arms round her knees and thought and thought and thought. At last she shook back her hair and stretched herself and stood up.
“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…
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