The Girl Green as Elderflower (15 page)

He turned his head away, and began thumping on the arm of the chair with growing violence. ‘But who am I to complain? I’m boring to look at and boring to talk to and boring in bed. I was lucky to get what I did get.’

Clare stared down into the fire, ignoring the boy’s tears. Eventually Mark sniffed, and said: ‘Cris.’

‘Yes, Marco.’

‘I brought a bottle of whisky. Couldn’t afford it, but I thought it looked sophisticated. Let’s get pissed, Cris.’

‘That’s the spirit,’ Clare said. ‘I’m with you to the end of the bottle.’

Much later, almost asleep, Mark asked: ‘Cris?’

‘Hullo?’

‘Have you ever had a woman down here?’

‘Not yet,’ Clare said. ‘But there’s one I think about.’

‘What’s she like?’ Mark asked drowsily.

Clare thought about what she was like. ‘Green as elderflower,’ he said. ‘Eyes green as elderflower.’

He wandered over to the table, where the book lay open. His eyes skimmed the familiar opening words.

Aliud quoque mirum priori non dissimile in Suthfolke contigit apud Sanctam Mariam de Wulpetes…

(De quodam puero et puella de terra emergentibus)

Another wonder not unlike the appearance of the wild man occurred in Suffolk at St Mary Woolpit. On the manor at this place belonging to Richard Calne, a soldier, a great throng of reapers was proceeding along the harvest field. The day was bright and hot, which, as afterwards appeared, was not without bearing on what followed; poppies and may weed stared in the yellow grain as yet unapproached by the reapers and gleaners; and over the summer-darkened hedgerows tangled with woodbine and traveller’s joy, invisible larks sang.

Some way from the field, in a sandy place grown with gorse, there were certain hollows or pits, which ignorant people called the Wolf Pits, to explain to themselves the name of the village. Towards these pits, during a pause in the work, a young reaper strayed on some business of his own, and so became (with round eyes and gaping mouth) the first to observe the prodigy over which the Abbot of Coggeshall and many more have marvelled.

Crouched near the edge of one of the pits this John observed two children, whom at first he took to be the children of neighbours playing at some game; for the sun was in his eyes and they were a little shadowed by a clump of brambles. But at the sound of his feet in the gorse the children rose and looked towards him, their eyes narrowed against the light, and seeming to see him only dimly, if at all. They were a girl and boy of perhaps seven and six years old, comely in form and in every way like any children of our world. But their hair and their eyes and all their skins were of the green of leeks.

The young reaper for some minutes only stared at their fear, with fear of his own in which there was pity too. Then he turned about and ran back to the harvest field, shouting to the lord of the harvest: ‘Roger! Roger, see what’s here!’

In a narrow vale stood the manor house of Wikes, looking out over its fishponds to a little wood which closed the view. Built of stone, whitewashed within and without, with a steep thatched roof adapted to the line of its curved ends, the house rose with a modest ceremony out of a ceremonious garden on the same small scale. A plot of fine grass lay before the hall door, bordered by other plots of herbs and roses. At the south end a wall enclosed an orchard of pears, apples, quinces, cherries, plums and a single vine, and there the strawberries also lurked brightly. In that weather the garden and the house itself, with its open door and narrow glassless windows, moaned with the many doves from its cote throughout the day.

At the time when the children came, the knight sat in the airy hall with only his wife for company. The lady, who after many disappointments was expecting her second child, was at her spinning, though a harp was within her reach should her husband wish for cheer. For the knight was melancholy, his blue eyes shadowed, his brown beard uncombed. A wound in battle had caused him a long illness, and though a man in the prime of his age he would never fight or tourney or hunt as he had done before. By his chair there rested a stick, curiously carved, where his hand gripped, with the leafed face of the Green Man.

When the reapers descended upon the house the knight was at first too rapt in thought to attend to their noise, brooding perhaps on his wound, or perhaps, as he now often did, on his only son, a boy being educated in the household of the bishop. So the lady too, for his peace, feigned to give all her attention to her spinning, though her ear was intent on the voice of Peter Butler disputing with Roger the lord of the harvest, and on the exclamations which came from Kit of Kersey, her faithful servant and friend.

At length, rising, she went some way towards the door, and called twice, not loudly: ‘Kit! Oh, Kit!’

The young woman heard, and had indeed been hovering outside the door for such a call, and she came quickly, but shyly (for it was understood that at that hour the hall was the knight’s alone) to her mistress. Her rosy face was a complexity of every feeling between wonder and tenderness.

‘Oh Madam,’ she cried. ‘Oh Madam.’

‘Why, Kit,’ said the lady, ‘how strange you look. And what is this crowd of folk in the garden? I hope it does not mean some poor soul is hurt in the harvest field.’

‘Thass no wonder if I look strange,’ said Kit, ‘for my eyes have sin the strangest thing under the sun. Madam, they all want to come in to the master, and Peter he won’t let none of them, but Madam, let Roger and John come and bring the children with them.’

‘What children, Kit?’ asked the lady.

‘The ones John find, Madam, near the harvest field. Two children lost or strayed, but so uncommon, Madam, that it won’t do no good for me to try to tell you. But have them fetched, and oh Madam, only see.’

‘Tell Peter, then,’ said the lady, ‘that those two men and the children may enter.’ And returning to her husband she said: ‘The reapers have found some poor children, who are lost, it seems.’

The knight looked on idly as his sturdy butler, in a yellow tunic, marched in before the reapers. Those two, dark silent Roger and hay-haired young John, walked close together, which the knight set down to the diffidence of such men inside his house. But when the butler stopped before him, said: ‘Sir, the strangers,’ and stepped aside; when the knight saw what the reapers held in a manner trapped between them; then he felt like a man shocked from a long day-dream, and grasping his stick leaped up, crying: ‘Holy Virgin!’

Being now out of the sun the children gazed at the knight, the most imposing man in the room, wide-eyed, and the beauty of their eyes amazed him like some stone never seen before. They were not of one unmixed green, but flecked or lined with different greens, and in each child’s eyes there was a different promise; for in the boy’s there was, as it were, a misting of blue, while in the girl’s was a haze of pale bird-breast brown.

Nor were their skins all of a single colour, but as there is variation with us (whose arms, for example, are darker above than below), so the skins of the green children verged in some places on the fairness of ladies. Noticing this, the knight thought first of the green of leeks, where that green meets white. But his second thought was of green elderbuds, at the point where they are transfigured into bloom.

The children’s hair was like silk, and green as barley, but like barley presaging gold. As for their clothes, the Yorkshireman William Petit has written that they were covered with raiment of unknown material; but the Abbot of Coggeshall, who heard these things from the knight himself, says nothing of such raiment, and for good reason. For what touched the knight and his lady more than the girl’s elfin face, more than the boy’s little warrior’s mouth and chin, was their likeness to pictures of our first father and mother before their fall. As if unaware, both covered their nakedness under small hands with nails like hazel leaves. And like our first parents, but later, both began to weep inconsolably.

That evening, when the long trestle table was set out in the hall, the green children sat not with the other children, but with the knight and his lady and with a certain priest, a true friend to the knight and himself a man of soldierly bearing, though grave. This priest looked continually at the children with wonder in which there was something of pity and of trepidation.

From all the food which was offered them, from beer and from wine, the children turned their heads away, and wept. And no delicacy prepared for them by kindly Kit, whose own child was of their age and was then in the hall, could tempt their appetite or bring a pause to their weeping.

At last the priest, who had meditated long, said to the children: ‘
Ydor ydorum?
’ And then, touching a handsome ewer of bronze in the form of a knight on horseback, from whose horse’s mouth the water poured, he added: ‘
Hydriai
?’ But the children merely looked at the ewer and wept. And when he asked, touching the salt: ‘
Halgein ydorum?
’ they gazed at him greenly, but evidently understood nothing, and wept again.

‘What are those words, father?’ inquired the knight’s lady.

‘I thought, Madam,’ said the priest, a little discomfited, ‘that in the story of the priest Elidorus there might be an answer to the marvel of these children. This Elidorus, as a boy of twelve, ran away from his studies, and hid himself in the hollow bank of a river near Neath, in Wales. And when he was in great hunger, two men of small stature came upon him and said: “If you will go with us, we shall take you to a land full of sports and delights.” The boy went willingly, at first down a path under the earth which was lightless, and came at length to a most beautiful country of rivers and meadows, woods and plains, but somewhat gloomy, for the sun never shone there, nor the moon or stars. Brought to the King, he was received with wonder and with great kindness, and the King gave him into the care of his own son, also a boy.

‘These men were of handsome form, with long fair hair to their shoulders like women, but very small, and their horses were the size of greyhounds. Though there was no cult of religion among them, they were strict in honour; and returning from our hemisphere, they often spoke in reprobation of our ambitions, infidelities and inconstancies, which things were unknown among them.

‘The boy Elidorus soon learned their language, and was permitted to visit our world as he liked, and so came to be rejoined with his mother, to whom he told all these things. But the woman, being greedy, asked him to bring her back a present of gold from that kingdom. So, on an unlucky day, while playing at ball with the King’s son, he seized the ball, which was of gold, and made off with it to his mother’s house.

‘But as he entered, his foot stuck fast on the threshold, and he fell. And two of those subterranean beings, following him, seized the ball, and with the greatest contempt and derision spat upon him, and he saw them no more. Nor could he ever again find the passage into their world, which was behind a waterfall, though he searched for a full year.

‘Almost inconsolable, the boy took again to his studies, and at last became a priest. But even in old age he could not speak of that land and its people without tears, and their language he never quite forgot. He remembered, and told the bishop when he was well stricken in years, that
ydor ydorum
meant with them: “Bring water”; and
halgein ydorum
, “Bring salt”; and
hydriai
water-pots or ewers such as this. All these matters are told by Gerald the Welshman, and are a most powerful lesson against greed, which is the destruction of all felicity.’

‘And yet, father,’ said the soldier, ‘these are no pygmy men, but children, and they have recognized nothing of those words remembered by the priest Elidorus.’

‘My test has failed,’ admitted the priest. ‘And therefore I am forced back to my first position, which is that they have fallen from the moon.’

The knight and the lady said nothing to that, but the lady at length suggested: ‘Let us take them into the garden, and show them the moon.’

To the moon and the stars the stubborn-faced boy paid little attention. But the girl, who seemed the older, gazed up at all the immensity above with a look of terror.

The priest spoke kindly to her, and as men will sometimes do with foreigners, made use of the one foreign tongue he knew, which was Latin. So he said, pointing: ‘
Luna.
’ And finding that her eyes seemed to return to the red planet, he told her: ‘
Stella Martialis.
’

Then for the first time the child spoke. She repeated the priest’s words, but strangely, so that it seemed to him that she said: ‘
Terra Martinianit
.’ And then both children, weak with fear and hunger, began to weep again.

Some days later Kit of Kersey was passing through the hall, where the children lay on the rushes as ever in tears, carrying with her beans which her little daughter had torn roughly in the garden.

The boy, raising his head, saw the green things, and with a shout rushed at the woman, snatched the beans, and carried them to the girl. With cries they began, joyfully, starvingly, to tear at their booty, seeking the beans, however, not in the pods but in the stalks. And not finding them, they began to weep again.