The Best British Short Stories of 1922 | Page 8

not himself. The gay,
debonair, and brilliant egoist was tortured, and tortured almost beyond
control; and it had all apparently risen through the ridiculous discussion
about a street. At a quarter past three in the morning he arose from his
bed with a groan, and, going into the other room, he tore the letter to
Mr. Sandeman to pieces.
Three weeks later old Stephen Garrit was lunching with the Lord Chief
Justice. They were old friends, and they never found it incumbent to be
very conversational. The lunch was an excellent, but frugal, meal. They
both ate slowly and thoughtfully, and their drink was water. It was not
till they reached the dessert stage that his lordship indulged in any very
informative comment, and then he recounted to Stephen the details of a
recent case in which he considered that the presiding judge had, by an

unprecedented paralogy, misinterpreted the law of evidence. Stephen
listened with absorbed attention. He took two cob-nuts from the silver
dish, and turned them over meditatively, without cracking them. When
his lordship had completely stated his opinion and peeled a pear,
Stephen mumbled:
"I have been impressed, very impressed indeed. Even in my own field
of--limited observation--the opinion of an outsider, you may say--so
often it happens--the trouble caused by an affirmation without
sufficiently established data. I have seen lives lost, ruin brought about,
endless suffering. Only last week, a young man--a brilliant
career--almost shattered. People make statements without----"
He put the nuts back on the dish, and then, in an apparently irrelevant
manner, he said abruptly:
"Do you remember Wych Street, my lord?"
The Lord Chief Justice grunted.
"Wych Street! Of course I do."
"Where would you say it was, my lord?"
"Why, here, of course."
His lordship took a pencil from his pocket and sketched a plan on the
tablecloth.
"It used to run from there to here."
Stephen adjusted his glasses and carefully examined the plan. He took a
long time to do this, and when he had finished his hand instinctively
went towards a breast pocket where he kept a note-book with little
squared pages. Then he stopped and sighed. After all, why argue with
the law? The law was like that--an excellent thing, not infallible, of
course (even the plan of the Lord Chief Justice was a quarter of a mile
out), but still an excellent, a wonderful thing. He examined the bony

knuckles of his hands and yawned slightly.
"Do you remember it?" said the Lord Chief Justice.
Stephen nodded sagely, and his voice seemed to come from a long way
off:
"Yes, I remember it, my lord. It was a melancholy little street."

THE OLIVE, by Algernon Blackwood
(From Pearson's Magazine, London)
Copyright, 1922, by Algernon Blackwood. Reprinted by permission of
the author and of A. P. Watt and Son.
He laughed involuntarily as the olive rolled towards his chair across the
shiny parquet floor of the hotel dining-room.
His table in the cavernous salle à manger was apart: he sat alone, a
solitary guest; the table from which the olive fell and rolled towards
him was some distance away. The angle, however, made him an
unlikely objective. Yet the lob-sided, juicy thing, after hesitating once
or twice en route as it plopped along, came to rest finally against his
feet.
It settled with an inviting, almost an aggressive air. And he stooped and
picked it up, putting it rather self-consciously, because of the girl from
whose table it had come, on the white tablecloth beside his plate.
Then, looking up, he caught her eye, and saw that she too was laughing,
though not a bit self-consciously. As she helped herself to the hors
d'oeuvres a false move had sent it flying. She watched him pick the
olive up and set it beside his plate. Her eyes then suddenly looked away
again--at her mother--questioningly.
The incident was closed. But the little oblong, succulent olive lay

beside his plate, so that his fingers played with it. He fingered it
automatically from time to time until his lonely meal was finished.
When no one was looking he slipped it into his pocket, as though,
having taken the trouble to pick it up, this was the very least he could
do with it. Heaven alone knows why, but he then took it upstairs with
him, setting it on the marble mantelpiece among his field glasses,
tobacco tins, ink-bottles, pipes and candlestick. At any rate, he kept
it--the moist, shiny, lob-sided, juicy little oblong olive. The hotel
lounge wearied him; he came to his room after dinner to smoke at his
ease, his coat off and his feet on a chair; to read another chapter of
Freud, to write a letter or two he didn't in the least want to write, and
then go