Beside a winding creek of the Lynher River, and not far from the Cornish
borough of Saltash, you may find a roofless building so closely backed
with cherry-orchards that the trees seem by their slow pressure to be
thrusting the mud-walls down to the river's brink, there to topple and
fall into the tide. The old trees, though sheeted with white blossom in
the spring, bear little fruit, and that of so poor a flavour as to be
scarcely worth picking. They have, in fact, almost reverted to savagery,
even as the cottage itself is crumbling back to the earth out of which it
was built. On the slope above the cherry-orchards, if you moor your boat
at the tumble-down quay and climb by half-obliterated pathways, you will
come to a hedge of brambles, and to a broken gate with a well beside it;
and beyond the gate to an orchard of apple-trees, planted in times when,
regularly as Christmas Eve came round, Aunt Barbree Furnace, her maid
Susannah, and the boy Nandy, would mount by this same path with a bowl of
cider, and anoint the stems one by one, reciting--
_Here's to thee, good apple-tree--
Pockets full, hats full, great bushel-bags full!
Amen, an' vire off the gun!_
--Whereupon Nandy, always after a caution to be extry-careful, would shut
his eyes, pull the trigger of his blunderbuss, and wake all the echoes of
the creek in an uproar which, as Susannah never failed to remark, was fit
to frighten every war-ship down in Hamoaze. The trees, grey with lichen,
sprawl as they have fallen under the weight of past crops. They go on
blossoming, year after year; even those that lie almost horizontally
remember their due season and burst into blowth, pouring (as it were) in
rosy-white cascades down the slope and through the rank grasses.
But as often as not the tenant neglects to gather the fruit. Nor is it
worth his while to grub up the old roots; for you cannot plant a new
orchard where an old one has decayed. One of these days (he tells me) he
means to do something with the wisht old place: meanwhile I doubt if he
sets foot in it once a year.
For me, I find it worth visiting at least twice a year: in spring when the
Poet's Narcissus flowers in great clumps under the north hedge, and the
columbines grow breast-high--pink, blue, and blood-red; and again in
autumn, for the sake of an apple which we call the gillyflower--small and
shy, but of incomparable flavour--and for a gentle melancholy which haunts
the spot like--yes, like a human face, and with faint companionable smiles
and murmurs of dead-and-gone laughter.
The tenant was right: it was a wisht old place, and the more wisht because
it lies so near to a world that has forgotten it. Above, if you row past
the bend of the creek, you will come upon trim villas with well-kept
gardens; below, and beyond the entrance to the creek, you look down a
broad river to the Hamoaze, crowded with torpedo-boats, powder-hulks,
training-ships, and great vessels of war. Around and behind
Merry-Garden--for that is its name--stretches a parish given up to the
cultivation of fruit and flowers; and across the creek another parish
'clothed'--I quote the local historian--'in flowers like a bride'; and
both parishes learned their prosperity from Merry-Garden the now deserted.
In mazzard time ('mazzards' are sweet black cherries) the sound of young
laughter floats across Merry-Garden; but the girls and boys who make the
laughter seldom, wander that way. No longer to its quay come boats with
holiday-parties from the Fleet and the Garrison at Plymouth, as they came
by scores a hundred years ago.
In those days Merry-Garden was a cherry-garden. The cottage was faced
with a verandah overlooking the tide. In the wide stone chimney-place,
where now, standing knee-deep in nettles, you may look up and see blue sky
beyond the starlings' nests, as many as twenty milk-pans have stood
together over the fire, that the visitors might have clotted cream to eat
with their strawberries and raspberries. In the orchards, from under
masses of traveller's joy, you may pull away rotten pieces of timber that
once made arbours and summer-houses.
The present tenant will sub-let you the whole of Merry-Garden, if you
wish, for two pounds ten shillings per annum. He is an old man, with an
amazing memory and about as much sentiment as my boot. From him I learned
the following story: and, with your leave, I will repeat it in his words.