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He went on putting brown stripes on a banana and brown curls on Queen Elizabeth’s head.
“Ahem!” said Mary Poppins, with a ladylike cough.
He turned with a start and saw her.
“Mary!” he cried, and you could tell by the way he cried it that Mary Poppins was a very important person in his life.
Mary Poppins looked down at her feet and rubbed the toe of one shoe along the pavement two or three times. Then she smiled at the shoe in such a way that the shoe knew quite well that the smile wasn’t meant for it.
“It’s my Day, Bert,” she said. “Didn’t you remember?” Bert was the Match Man’s name – Herbert Alfred for Sundays.
“Of course I remembered, Mary,” he said, “but—” and he stopped and looked sadly into his cap. It lay on the ground beside his last picture and there was tuppence in it. He picked it up and jingled the pennies.
“That all you got, Bert?” said Mary Poppins, and she said it so brightly you could hardly tell she was disappointed at all.
“That’s the lot,” he said. “Business is bad today. You’d think anybody’d be glad to pay to see that, wouldn’t you?” And he nodded his head at Queen Elizabeth. “Well – that’s how it is, Mary,” he sighed. “Can’t take you to tea today, I’m afraid.”
Mary Poppins thought of the raspberry-jam cakes they always had on her Day Out, and she was just going to sigh, when she saw the Match Man’s face. So, very cleverly, she turned the sigh into a smile – a good one with both ends turned up – and said:
“That’s all right, Bert. Don’t you mind. I’d much rather not go to tea. A stodgy meal, I call it – really.”
And that, when you think how very much she liked raspberry-jam cakes, was rather nice of Mary Poppins.
The Match Man apparently thought so, too, for he took her white-gloved hand in his and squeezed it hard. Then together they walked down the row of pictures.
“Now, there’s one you’ve never seen before!” said the Match Man proudly, pointing to a painting of a mountain covered with snow and its slopes simply littered with grasshoppers sitting on gigantic roses.
This time Mary Poppins could indulge in a sigh without hurting his feelings.
“Oh, Bert,” she said, “that’s a fair treat!” And by the way she said it she made him feel that by rights the picture should have been in the Royal Academy, which is a large room where people hang the pictures they have painted. Everybody comes to see them, and when they have looked at them for a very long time, everybody says to everybody else: “The idea – my dear!”
The next picture Mary Poppins and the Match Man came to was even better. It was the country – all trees and grass and a little bit of blue sea in the distance, and something that looked like Margate in the background.
“My word!” said Mary Poppins admiringly, stooping so that she could see it better. “Why, Bert, whatever is the matter?”
For the Match Man had caught hold of her other hand now and was looking very excited.
“Mary,” he said, “I got an idea! A real idea. Why don’t we go there – right now – this very day? Both together, into the picture. Eh, Mary?”And still holding her hands he drew her right out of the street, away from the iron railings and the lamp-posts, into the very middle of the picture. Pff! There they were, right inside it!
How green it was there and how quiet, and what soft crisp grass under their feet! They could hardly believe it was true, and yet here were green branches huskily rattling on their hats as they bent beneath them, and little coloured flowers curling round their shoes. They stared at each other, and each noticed that the other had changed. To Mary Poppins, the Match Man seemed to have bought himself an entirely new suit of clothes, for he was now wearing a bright green-and-red striped coat and white flannel trousers and, best of all, a new straw hat. He looked unusually clean, as though he had been polished.
“Why, Bert, you look fine!” she cried in an admiring voice.
Bert could not say anything for a moment, for his mouth had fallen open and he was staring at her with round eyes. Then he gulped and said: “Golly!”
That was all. But he said it in such a way and stared so steadily and so delightedly at her that she took a little mirror out of her bag and looked at herself in it.
She, too, she discovered, had changed. Round her shoulders hung a cloak of lovely artificial silk with watery patterns all over it, and the tickling feeling at the back of her neck came, the mirror told her, from a long curly feather that swept down from the brim of her hat. Her best shoes had disappeared, and in their place were others much finer and with large diamond buckles shining upon them. She was still wearing the white gloves and carrying the umbrella.
“My goodness,” said Mary Poppins, “I am having a Day Out!”
So, still admiring themselves and each other, they moved on together through the little wood, till presently they came upon a little open space filled with sunlight. And there on a green table was Afternoon Tea!
A pile of raspberry-jam cakes as high as Mary Poppins’ waist stood in the centre, and beside it tea was boiling in a big brass urn. Best of all, there were two plates of whelks and two pins to pick them out with.
“Strike me pink!” said Mary Poppins. That was what she always said when she was pleased.
“Golly!” said the Match Man. And that was his particular phrase.
“Won’t you sit down, Moddom?” enquired a voice, and they turned to find a tall man in a black coat coming out of the wood with a table napkin over his arm.
Mary Poppins, thoroughly surprised, sat down with a plop upon one of the little green chairs that stood round the table. The Match Man, staring, collapsed on to another.
“I’m the Waiter, you know!” explained the man in the black coat.
“Oh! But I didn’t see you in the picture,” said Mary Poppins.
“Ah, I was behind the tree,” explained the Waiter.
“Won’t you sit down?” said Mary Poppins, politely.
“Waiters never sit down, Moddom,” said the man but he seemed pleased at being asked.
“Your whelks, Mister!” he said, pushing a plate of them over to the Match Man.“And your Pin!” He dusted the pin on his napkin and handed it to the Match Man.
They began upon the afternoon tea, and the Waiter stood beside them to see they had everything they needed.
“We’re having them after all,” said Mary Poppins in a loud whisper, as she began on the heap of raspberry-jam cakes.
“Golly!” agreed the Match Man, helping himself to two of the largest.
“Tea?” said the Waiter, filling a large cup for each of them from the urn.
They drank it and had two cups more each, and then, for luck, they finished the pile of raspberry-jam cakes. After that they got up and brushed the crumbs off.
“There is Nothing to Pay,” said the Waiter, before they had time to ask for the bill. “It is a Pleasure. You will find the Merry-go-Round just over there!” And he waved his hand to a little gap in the trees, where Mary Poppins and the Match Man could see several wooden horses whirling round on a stand.
“That’s funny,” said she. “I don’t remember seeing that in the picture, either.”
“Ah,” said the Match Man, who hadn’t remembered it himself, “it was in the Background, you see!”
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