Page:World Fiction 1922–1923.djvu/580

 from the knotted corner of a handkerchief, and in the readiness with which he later pays legal fees of whatever size.

This country clientage has, to be sure, its shady sides. Not among the least of these is the fact that such an individual usually smells of fur and in winter likes to sit close to the office stove where, like a snow man, he gradually thaws out into pools of dirty water.

In the case I refer to, this rustic affair was inscribed in the register of Dr. X under the modest title of Matthew Prochazka. The matter first came to the office some three years before, and in a short time won all hearts. It began with a dispute whose subject was far more suited to a pastoral idyl or as material for a poem than as the object of a legal controversy.

It was an apple tree. An apple tree—of poetic association—as charming in May when thousands of buzzing bees flit about its fraggrant rose and white crown as in the fall when its green branches bend beneath the sweet burden of blushing apples.

The thing happened this way. On the boundary line which divided the Prochazka farm from the field belonging to Barbara Vrchcabova stood a lone apple-tree in whose shade in former years the owners of the two neighboring properties used often to sit at harvest time beside each other in perfect harmony. But one year Mrs. Vrchcabova had the tree, which was now quite old, garnered of its fruit—although, as later the alternate conflicting documents verified, this act produced her not quite a basketful of sourish apples—and a few days later Matthew Prochazka preferred through his legal representative a two-page charge against her for trespassing.

Since that time a great many other quarrels between the two neighbors had been added to the dispute over the apple tree. They included controversies about the boundary line, the overhanging eaves, an obstructed window, a protruding rafter and other illegal trespasses vi clam precario; but the apple tree still held the foreground and became for the office an inseparable symbol of the personality of Matthew Prochazka.

“Well, what about the apple-tree?” was the first question of the clerks, whenever they magnanimously opened a conversation with him, and the chief began each relation of the events in a new quarrel of his country client with his rapacious neighbor by jabbing a dot in the center of a sheet of paper with the words: “Here, then, stands the apple tree—and here to the right, etc”

Many of the later altercations had long since concluded, but the strife over the apple-tree dragged along endlessly. I don’t know the cause of its unnatural length, whether the contest slid over from the firm ground of possessed property to the slippery arena of the question of ownership, or whether the progress of the law suit was held back by some probatio diabolica—for I do not understand such things. But certain it is that Prochazka continued to ask at each visit, “And how far along are we, please, with the apple-tree?”

“It won’t be long now till the preliminary evidence is all in,” answered the lawyer.

“I don’t care what I have to pay—just see to it, Mr. Lawyer, that she has a lot of expense!”

It was no wonder that good old Prochazka wished that every evil might befall his neighbor. A child-