It was one evening in early summer when the Green Man met the Devil under an apple tree in the orchard.
‘I’d heard you favoured fruit,’ said the Green Man, offering him a Worcester Pearmain.
‘Good evening,’ said the Devil, with a charming, quizzical look; ‘I’d been hoping we’d meet.’
The Green Man looked hard at the Devil and thought, ‘But this must be a looking-glass. He is just like me.’
The Green Man walked all round the apple tree and examined the Devil from every side. It could not be a looking-glass, because the Green Man could see the back of the Devil’s neck, which was creased with lines as deep as the bark of an old tree. He felt the back of his own neck and found them there too.
Coming round in front again he watched the Devil picking his pointed teeth with a twig, and saw that the Devil’s eyes were his own eyes at certain times or phases of the moon. They were watchful and knowing and on the hypnotic side.
‘We have not been introduced,’ said the Green Man defensively.
‘Oh, yes, we have,’ said the Devil. ‘We’re reintroduced every day of our lives.’
‘Your place is in hell,’ said the Green Man. ‘Each to his element.’
‘My place is with you,’ said the Devil. ‘I’m in my element with you. Every minute of the day. You can’t get away from me. Look at those mice and those mermaids.’
‘I spared the mice and the mermaids,’ said the Green Man.
‘Only just,’ said the Devil. ‘And your daughters did the clearing-up. And what about your twelve sons?’
The Green Man fell silent. ‘They are grown and flown,’ he said. ‘We are part of one another, therefore I have no guilt. I cannot go searching for them specifically. It isn’t my destiny.’
‘I have things to show you,’ said the Devil. ‘Perhaps you will accompany me to the moon and find your destiny?’
On the moon the two twins sat side by side upon a rock and looked down upon the beautiful blue planet, so small in the sky.
‘Yours,’ said the Devil.
‘It’s been said before,’ said the Green Man. ‘Are the conditions the same?’
‘Yours,’ said the Devil again. ‘Here’s a zap. Zap it.’
‘No,’ said the Green Man.
‘Why not? The earth has never been good to you. Look how you’ve worked for it and loved it. Do you imagine that places love you back? A landscape doesn’t hesitate to destroy you. Your fate has been predicted since humanity could predict. You are touched with death. You are strangled by the living green. Look at the old carvings of you in all those churches and ancient palaces. In the end you will vanish from the earth.’
‘I keep away from carvings.’
‘The Greeks and Romans made stone effigies of you and the Christians made copies. Over half the world there are images of you with vines growing like moustaches out of your nostrils. Then from your ears, and even your tongue. Sometimes they even grow from your eyeballs. Your beautiful face is the face of grief. You are born to die. It is eternal sorrow that stares through the leaves. Sad and bound is the Green Man.’
‘There is Christ,’ said the Green Man.
‘Is there?’ asked the Devil.
‘Go on, zap them,’ said the Devil. ‘Zap them all, down there. You could.’
‘They are my sons and daughters.’
‘They don’t care for you. You are nothing but a nuisance to them. You embarrass your sons. Your death would be welcome. You are a burden and a reproach.’
‘They are part of me, my twelve sons. And my four daughters.’
‘I’m part of you, too,’ said the Devil. ‘Let ’em go.’
The Green Man sat silent.
‘The moon is clean and free,’ said the Devil, ‘untainted as yet by human wickedness. You with your green fingers could bring here the first new shoot, which would break into grasses and flowers, crops and forests. You could create a new world, perfect in God’s sight. You yourself could be God. The wilderness would flower like no earthly paradise. Let the old world go.’
‘I’d need the earth for back-up,’ said the Green Man, weakening; and as he said it, some moss that had become caught in his hair—from a low branch of the apple tree—slid out of his leafy curls. A spider that had been living in the moss began a hasty thread from the curls to the moondust.
The Green Man watched the spider, which went tearing about here and there and bouncing up and down like a yo-yo. The Green Man held out his finger and tweaked the spider back, and for want of anywhere better flicked him up into his hair again. ‘I cannot leave the greenwood,’ he said.
‘Almost everything else has,’ said the Devil. ‘And what do you mean “greenwood”? D’you think you’re Shakespeare or something?’
‘I’m something,’ said the Green Man.
‘You’re nothing at all,’ said the Devil. ‘You don’t know who you are or what you are. All this about elements, you don’t know your own. Nobody believes in you. You’re kids’-book stuff. They don’t even call pubs after you any more. They change them to something from Walt Disney. The only ones who go on about you now are black-magic freaks who think you’re something to do with me.’
‘Not quite the only ones,’ said the Green Man.
‘Well—who else? The has-beens, the hoi polloi, the folk historians?’
‘Sadie and Billy believed in me,’ said the Green Man, ‘and Patsy. And the corn chandler.’
‘Who he?’ asked the Devil, commonly.
‘The water voles, the geese, the mice and the mermaids believe in me.’
‘Oh, Christ!’ said the Devil.
‘Oh, what?’ said the Green Man.
The Devil stirred up the moondust with his finger, gently, so that the pressure didn’t bounce him away. He seemed unenthusiastic about answering.
‘D’you really think Christ cares about you?’ he said at last. ‘Think what a world you live in. Think what a wonder it could be and what he’s allowed you to do with it. I tell you—forget him. Zap it. And him. Create the moon.’
‘The moon is created.’
‘Re-create it. Clothe it. Beautify it above the earth. Look at the potential, man. Look around you. A pure new architecture, rivers of silver, mountains of gold. After you’ve moved the space-trash of course.’
‘I would spawn more.’
‘Technology, man, technology. Enlightened clearances create a world of light. Get the straw from your hair. You spend whole days, whole years, scything the grass of an orchard nobody needs. You can get bags of apples half the price in the supermarket. And think of the space on the moon. You could do it. With my help. All you have to do is believe in me.’
The Green Man tried now, seriously, to consider the Devil’s rational good sense and to analyse what the earth and the moon really meant for him. He thought of the moon’s calm light as it sailed above the branches of the orchard.
‘It’s not for me to change it,’ he said.
‘I’m disappointed in you,’ said the Devil.
‘I’m disappointed in you,’ said the Green Man.
‘But why?’ asked the Devil with his sweet and loving smile.
‘You’re nothing but my shabby self,’ said the Green Man. ‘You’re the dark side of my soul. You’re déjà vu.’
The Devil then threw a rock at him and vanished and the Green Man in an instant was back in the orchard, under a Ribston Pippin. It was cold and raining and the fruits above his head looked ungrateful and sour. He found himself weeping and weak.
‘I must sleep,’ he said, ‘here in the grass and the rain. When I wake perhaps I won’t feel that it’s been a defeat,’ and he fell asleep in the grass that would be cut for hay on Saturday.
The spider walked out of his hair and spun a beautiful web across his tired eyes.