The Girl Green as Elderflower

by Randolph Stow

  ‘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.

  But kindly Kit, forgiving the hungry child his robber’s manners, came to them and showed them where the beans were to be found. And then, chattering in their unknown tongue, they eagerly devoured them, and by signs asked for more. And for a long time they nourished themselves with beans entirely.

  Concerning this the priest had many doubts, for beans are condemned by Pythagoras, and are thought by some to contain departed souls. And as Bartholomew the Englishman has written: ‘By oft use thereof the wits are dulled and they cause many dreams.’ But the children, growi
ng by degrees stronger and ceasing to bewail their outcast condition, became accustomed to eat whatever was set before them, and by signs made the priest understand that until then they had refused other food only because of its strangeness, and from fear that it would poison them. But once their trust in Kit was firm, they would accept any dish from her hand; and from her their trust was extended to all the people of the manor, and they became happy, hearty children. But the boy was often shaken by fits of passion, and the soldier, who was growing to love him, said: ‘Out of this bean will sprout a terrible knight.’

  The lady’s time drew near, and her son, a boy of nine years, came to visit the manor from the bishop’s household where he was being schooled. And being so young, and vain of his little learning, as well as charmed by the pointed face and strange eyes of the green girl, he made a doggerel rhyme about her in Latin, calling her Viridia. And he sang it to his mother’s harp.

  Viridia mirabilis

  Tam pulchra quam amabilis;

  Colloquium nemo intelligit,

  Quod puto esse habilis.

  By which he meant, or wished to mean:

  Viridia the marvellous,

  As amiable as fair;

  Her speech no man can understand,

  Which shows her wit, I swear.

  In due course the lady was delivered of a daughter, whom the knight welcomed with a good grace, though he had prayed for a boy, for his son Mark, he felt sure, was destined for the clergy or the court, and he longed for a little soldier. At the baptism of the child, whose name was Lucy, the green children watched intently, and the girl, pointing at the baby and at Mark, and then at herself and the green boy, made it understood that they too were brother and sister.

  After that baptism the priest took to spending much time with the children, and began to teach the boy his letters, from a feeling that he might in this way come to have some knowledge of their language. The boy was no diligent scholar, having an adoration for horses and hawks, but the girl, very strangely for a female, took to learning with the ardour of a clerk, and soon not only wrote fairly, copying both English and Latin, but acquired a knowledge of our tongue, which she spoke with sometimes comical grammar, but in a clear precise accent like a lady.

  So through her the priest instructed the boy in the tenets of our faith, and in time both were regenerated by the holy waters of baptism. The priest had wished to name them Barbara and Peregrine: each name, as he said, meaning ‘stranger’. But because of the boy Mark’s rhyme, the girl had long been called either Amabel or Mirabel, and at the lady’s insistence both names were given to her at the font. As for the boy, the knight said that he was made to be a warrior, and must carry the name of the most glorious and holy of warriors, and he was therefore baptized Michael.

  But not long afterwards the boy began to dwindle and pine, and when he grew too weak to walk was laid in a truckle bed in the hall, where at meal times his green eyes watched the company wistfully. He could eat little, though kind Kit brought him, in his own silver-rimmed mazer, many delicacies easy to stomach. The priest and the lady were frequently with him, and his sister always, and just as often the lame knight’s chair was beside the bed. The two never spoke, but the soldier would look with a yearning helplessness into the child’s eyes, in which there was more blue than formerly.

  There came an evening when the soldier took his usual place, carrying with him a handful of beans which he himself had gathered in the moonlit garden. The child accepted them with a wan smile, and after swallowing one or two, said in English the word: ‘Grace.’

  Then a change came over his face, and reaching out he took the stick which leaned against the knight’s leg, and gazed long at the face which was carved on it. And to himself he murmured one word in his own tongue.

  ‘Amabel,’ said the soldier, ‘what does he say?’

  The boy murmured again, and the girl said, her face thin with dread: ‘He says: “Green.” He says: “Home.” He says: “Green home.”’

  The boy’s green-blue eyes, fixed on the carved face, slowly closed. With his free hand he touched the knight’s crippled knee, and then he died.

  The soldier and the girl, leaving him to the priest and the woman, went out into the garden. And under the stars and the moon, looking up, the knight said: ‘There, perhaps, he goes, into that awful vastness, where the warrior-archangel will receive him with loving-kindness and guide him to his green home.’

  As a star fell, the girl, who had been disturbingly still, burst into a passion of tears. The soldier, with tears on his own lean cheeks, clutched her to him, and stroking her hair, which in the moonlight was blonde, said: ‘Oh Amabel, oh little Mirabel. There are more green homes than one.’

  Seven years passed. The girl, growing perfect in our tongue, also most surprisingly showed herself at fourteen very skilled in music, and a scholar the equal of any abbess in the land. The priest somewhat ruefully admitted her his superior. Yet she was no abbess in the making, but chambermaid to the lady and nursemaid to her little daughter, and as a foundling and a stranger there was no girl or man on the manor who did not think her of lower station.

  Among the youths of the manor was one Robin, a dark lad of pleasing and humorous countenance, foster-brother to the knight’s son Mark. For months he had watched the girl with an admiration in which there was something curious and sly. And one day in late May he said to her: ‘Mirabel, you used to be partial to beans. Shouldn’t you like to come with me and smell the beanfield in flower?’

  When they came to the beanfield, the sweetness of it was an intoxication to the girl, and she stood among the flowers with her elfin face rapt, as if ecstatic with wine. Her skin, by that time, was between green and white, as at that moment the elderflower was. Her fair hair, though streaked with green, had turned lightest blonde, and her eyes were a confusion of green and hazel.

  The boy Robin, with a secretive grin, loosened the drawstring of his linen breeches, and said: ‘Hey, Mirabel, ever seen one of these?’

  The girl’s beautiful eyes showed shock, and some disgust. But the boy, quite gently yet with his customary indifference, simply clasped her and laid her down among the beanflowers.

  Long afterwards, Robin told everything to a crony. ‘She have all the clothes off me,’ he said. ‘It was like she want to swallow me whole. She keep calling out in her foreign lingo. And she say: “Oh, you’re warm,” she say, “you’re mine.” She say: “Robin, love me, love me.” She say: “Oh, I was alone.” When I couldn’t do no more, she just hold me like a baby, and she say: “You’re mine,” she say “you’re mine.”’

  For weeks after that the green girl and the dark boy were lovers. But because of her strange intensity, or because, more likely, of a coolness in his own nature, he began to avoid her, and took up with Margery, she who was the laughing-stock of the dairy because, for beauty’s sake, she had been seen to wash herself in milk. For a long time thereafter the green girl seemed in her inscrutable way to mourn. But some yearning had been awakened in her by the lad’s body, and when cheerfulness returned she became (as the knight afterwards told the Lord Abbot) nimium lasciva et petulans, that is, very lascivious and wanton.

  One day the girl came upon Roger, the man who had been lord of the harvest when she and her brother were discovered, alone in a wood, sitting on a log to take his noonday bread and beer. She seated herself beside him, and accepted some beer. At last the man broke his silence to ask a question which had been in his mind for nearly eight years. ‘Tell me straight, gal, where was you and young Mikey from?’

  Without answering, the girl took the knife from his waist, and choosing a piece of rotten wood began very skilfully to carve. When she had finished, she showed the man her work.

  ‘Oh-ah,’ said Roger. ‘A woman, and up the stick.’

  The rude figure was indeed of a grinning woman, large-breasted and hugely pregnant.

  ‘That,’ the girl said, ‘is our goddess. We were children of the flint-mines. Day after day, year af
ter year, century after century, we crawled along the galleries of our mines, loosening flints with our picks made from the antlers of red deer. I do not understand our life. I do not understand how we came here. But suddenly we found ourselves in that pit, in the blinding sun and stunning heat, and could discover no hole leading back to the gallery. And so we lay there weeping, until seized away.’

  ‘I do believe,’ said Roger, ‘that you might be talking about Grime’s Graves.’

  ‘I have never heard that name,’ the girl said. ‘I remember only our mines and galleries, and our goddess, before whose figure carved in chalk a little lamp burned.’

  ‘And what about your god?’ asked Roger, and sniggered. ‘She didn’t get that way on her own, if I recall the facts of life.’

  The girl took up the knife again, and turning aside, her long greenish-fair hair dangling, began to carve once more. When she had finished, she held out to Roger a phallus, the glans and testicles painstakingly distinct.

  ‘That,’ she said, ‘is our god.’

  ‘Something tell me,’ said Roger, ‘I sin him before. Yes, and not so very far from here.’

  For answer the girl pulled the drawstring of his breeches.

  Afterwards she said, or pleaded: ‘Roger, you love me?’

  ‘Love?’ said the taciturn man. ‘Why, gal, that int one of my words. But,’ he said, giving her a slap on the rump, ‘I’ll say this for you, you int a bad little old poke.’

  The girl liked to haunt the woods and the heaths, and in another wood one day the soldier, walking for exercise of his leg, found her lying among last year’s leaves. Over her head an elderbush, its flowers in their last fragile fullness, smelled overpoweringly heavy.

  ‘Mirabel,’ he said, with the help of his stick and with a little difficulty sitting beside her, ‘Mirabel, you are no longer a green girl. You are the fairest and whitest of girls, as white as elderflower.’

  The girl said nothing, but taking the knight’s stick she gazed intently at the carved face, as the dying boy had done, a memory which softened the melancholy soldier.