A Little Treachery

5

It was not that they had never considered the traffic!

The question, the only question, as they had seen it, was whether they could stand such perpetual turmoil only a few feet from their door. Of course they would never have chosen it. But, accustomed to the noise of town streets as they were, they had decided it could be put up with well enough, considering the many compensating charms of the place.

‘And there’s always the garden. In the summer, if we find the traffic tiresome, we can sit at the far end of the garden, down by the stream. Such a long garden – we shall be well away from the noise.’ They promised themselves that they would have a lawn made. One big lawn should stretch to the stream under those old fruit trees – and they would get a man to tend it for them, too. They saw themselves in deck-chairs, in a lovely orchard place beside the swift little Berle, hearing nothing but the trees and the birds and the rippling water.

Ah, yes, the garden!

Its full length they had learned with astonishment and some dismay, for, viewing it from the house, one’s eye was cheated by the gradual but continuous downward slope of the ground. However, it was narrow, and no high standards were imposed upon them. Neighbouring gardens were no affairs of shaven lawn and trimmed hedge, they were true cottagers’ gardens, a flower-plot here, a vegetable-patch there, and the rest in coarse grass under the fruit trees which was cut with a grass-hook in summer. Such a standard was within their powers, they reckoned.

And surely no site could have looked fairer or seemed to offer a fairer setting for a garden, with its gentle slope down to the stream which was bordered by the lovely, shimmering trees that favour watery ground, the willows and the black poplars and the cursive ash, with its glimpses of the two great mill-ponds gleaming through at a little distance, where there were many water-birds and the romantic figures of swans could be seen gliding; all set off by the incomparable background of wooded hillside? Then, although the landscape was full of trees, the garden was open, sunny; it was warm in the valley.

In short, they were enchanted, quite carried away, full of happy plans and prepared to spend upon the beautifying of this wonderful spot a great deal more than they could sensibly afford.

So thankful they were, so grateful for their good fortune!

Looking down upon that riotous welter of wild things, they saw the great discs of the angelica, of the monster cow-parsnip, of the virulent water-hemlock, royal spires of purple loosestrife, plumes of golden-rod, water-mint grown into bushes of light, cloudy heliotrope and the grey seeding heads of the rose-bay; all pushing up out of the massed nettles, the mare’s-tails, the suckers and saplings, in the greenest, richest growth in that parched summer.

But they had lived too long in town. They had forgotten nature’s signatures. They merely marvelled and delighted in this gorgeous festival of bloom and colour and received it as an earnest of vitality – never remarking that all they could see were the weeds which grow so rankly on foul, waterlogged soil. A mere jungle without paths, the garden was really impassable to those not properly equipped, and although one could walk the length of it on the neighbour’s grass balk, it happened that, perhaps too much occupied with indoor affairs, perhaps because of a mood which was now all foreboding, they did not do this, and did not attempt an exploration till more than a week after they had settled there. To their eyes, as they had looked at it from afar, it had seemed just a piece of rough, overgrown ground which might be difficult to subdue, but never had it entered their heads that they might find it irreclaimable.

The moment of which they had dreamed, that great moment of making their first progress round their little kingdom, was put off and only faced at last in a slightly unnatural mood of gaiety.

Sinking spirits were not needed to render the picture monstrous.

On that ground, the umbellifers grew six feet high, their flower-heads were like saucers, their seeds like clappers; their grooved and bristled or purplish stems had the girth of saplings. The huge size and coarseness of all these water-gutted plants were quite daunting, quite shocking, at close view. Purple loosestrife was a delight to the eye, but it grew on an unfathomable bed of decay, of matted grass and rushes and layer upon layer of brown, liquescent stalk and stem. A number of ancient apple trees bore a harvest of red-cheeked apples, yet half the boughs were leafless, formed like coral and covered with a green mould; even those which seemed well-nigh dead had put forth a crop of strangely waxen, unnatural-looking, miniature fruit. Indeed, one felt it was a marvel, and almost unnatural, horrible, that such trees should bear fruit at all, for the trunks were strangled with ivy, so wrapped and invested with that poisonous, sour parasite that their shapes were fantastic, swollen, bulging; the boles rolled in a morass.

The ground was all levels, but at no point was it possible to see honest earth. The thicket of weeds through which they scrambled had merely grown up over unknown rubbish – masses of sticks, bricks, dead trunks, accretions which formed hillocks, inexplicable subsidences which nearly brought one to one’s knees. No matter where they stepped, water always squelched under their tread. Yet the weather was dry. A great outbreak of nettles occupied a higher area, of which they had hopes as they made their way towards it; but beneath was nothing but a huge rubbish heap, some ancient dump of bricks, stones, rotten wood, paint-pots, wire netting and lumps of masonry – it was as if a whole building had collapsed and been allowed to lie as it had fallen. And still in all the crevices water gleamed.

Frogs leapt out at every movement, and in such numbers as they had never before seen anywhere or imagined possible; toads crawled with their old man’s gait, and everywhere they encountered this most ancient of faces, with the flat saurian orbits which make the large, dark eyes of the toad slightly baleful. They were not women of the kind to shudder at frogs and toads; they had been amused by the few of these harmless little tenants which they had seen up near the house. But now, in such horrid multiplication that one could hardly avoid treading on them –!

Ivy and a huge mat of reeds and mare’s-tails of the grossest size claimed the lower end of the domain, and through this mat the scarlet clubs of the cuckoo-pint poked, as if to mark some spot more rankly poisonous than the rest. Strong over it all was the smell of stagnant water and rotting vegetation.

There was no blinking the fact, they had been vilely swindled. Everything possible was wrong with their bargain, both house and ground.

So they came at last to a standstill. Words died away. They were overwhelmed by this final stroke. The whole place, dripping with its cold dews which never dried up, even in the heat of the day, seemed to be oozing a mortal sweat like the sweat of their own shock.

And the words ‘a bad spot’ came to mind.