The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Choice, by Edith Wharton
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Choice
1916
Author: Edith Wharton
Release Date: January 17, 2008 [EBook #24348]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CHOICE ***
Produced by David Widger
THE CHOICE
By Edith Wharton
Copyright, 1916, By Charles Scribner’s Sons
I
Stilling, that night after dinner, had surpassed himself. He always did, Wrayford reflected, when the small fry from Highfield came to dine. He, Cobham Stilling, who had to find his bearings and keep to his level in the big heedless ironic world of New York, dilated and grew vast in the congenial medium of Highfield. The Red House was the biggest house of the Highfield summer colony, and Cobham Stilling was its biggest man. No one else within a radius of a hundred miles (on a conservative estimate) had as many horses, as many greenhouses, as many servants, and assuredly no one else had three motors and a motorboat for the lake.
The motorboat was Stilling’s latest hobby, and he rode—or steered—it in and out of the conversation all the evening, to the obvious edification of every one present save his wife and his visitor, Austin Wrayford. The interest of the latter two who, from opposite ends of the drawing-room, exchanged a fleeting glance when Stilling again launched his craft on the thin current of the talk—the interest of Mrs. Stilling and Wrayford had already lost its edge by protracted contact with the subject.
But the dinner-guests—the Rector, Mr. Swordsley, his wife Mrs. Swordsley, Lucy and Agnes Granger, their brother Addison, and young Jack Emmerton from Harvard—were all, for divers reasons, stirred to the proper pitch of feeling. Mr. Swordsley, no doubt, was saying to himself: “If my good parishioner here can afford to buy a motorboat, in addition to all the other expenditures which an establishment like this must entail, I certainly need not scruple to appeal to him again for a contribution for our Galahad Club.” The Granger girls, meanwhile, were evoking visions of lakeside picnics, not unadorned with the presence of young Mr. Emmerton; while that youth himself speculated as to whether his affable host would let him, when he came back on his next vacation, “learn to run the thing himself”; and Mr. Addison Granger, the elderly bachelor brother of the volatile Lucy and Agnes, mentally formulated the precise phrase in which, in his next letter to his cousin Professor Spildyke of the University of East Latmos, he should allude to “our last delightful trip in my old friend Cobham Stilling’s ten-thousand-dollar motorlaunch”—for East Latmos was still in that primitive stage of culture on which five figures impinge.
Isabel Stilling, sitting beside Mrs. Swordsley, her bead slightly bent above the needlework with which on these occasions it was her old-fashioned habit to employ herself—Isabel also had doubtless her reflections to make. As Wrayford leaned back in his corner and looked at her across the wide flower-filled drawing-room he noted, first of all—for the how many hundredth time?—the play of her hands above the embroidery-frame, the shadow of the thick dark hair on her forehead, the lids over her somewhat full grey eyes. He noted all this with a conscious deliberateness of enjoyment, taking in unconsciously, at the same time, the particular quality in her attitude, in the fall of her dress and the turn of her head, which had set her for him, from the first day, in a separate world; then he said to himself: “She is certainly thinking: ‘Where on earth will Cobham get the money to pay for it?’”
Stilling, cigar in mouth and thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, was impressively perorating from his usual dominant position on the hearth-rug.
“I said: ‘If I have the thing at all, I want the best that can be got.’ That’s my way, you know, Swordsley; I suppose I’m what you’d call fastidious. Always was, about everything, from cigars to wom—” his eye met the apprehensive glance of Mrs. Swordsley, who looked like her husband with his clerical coat cut slightly lower—“so I said: ‘If I have the thing at all, I want the best that can be got.’ Nothing makeshift for me, no second-best. I never cared for the cheap and showy. I always say frankly to a man: ‘If you can’t give me a first-rate cigar, for the Lord’s sake let me smoke my own.’” He paused to do so. “Well, if you have my standards, you can’t buy a thing in a minute. You must look round, compare, select. I found there were lots of motorboats on the market, just as there’s lots of stuff called champagne. But I said to myself: ‘Ten to one there’s only one fit to buy, just as there’s only one champagne fit for a gentleman to drink.’ Argued like a lawyer, eh, Austin?” He tossed this to Wrayford. “Take me for one of your own trade, wouldn’t you? Well, I’m not such a fool as I look. I suppose you fellows who are tied to the treadmill—excuse me, Swordsley, but work’s work, isn’t it?—I suppose you think a man like me has nothing to do but take it easy: loll through life like a woman. By George, sir, I’d like either of you to see the time it takes—I won’t say the brain—but just the time it takes to pick out a good motorboat. Why, I went—”
Mrs. Stilling set her embroidery-frame noiselessly on the table at her side, and turned her head toward Wrayford. “Would you mind ringing for the tray?”
The interruption helped Mrs. Swordsley to waver to her feet. “I’m afraid we ought really to be going; my husband has an early service to-morrow.”
Her host intervened with a genial protest. “Going already? Nothing of the sort! Why, the night’s still young, as the poet says. Long way from here to the rectory? Nonsense! In our little twenty-horse car we do it in five minutes—don’t we, Belle? Ah, you’re walking, to be sure—” Stilling’s indulgent gesture seemed to concede that, in such a case, allowances must be made, and that he was the last man not to make them. “Well, then, Swordsley—” He held out a thick red hand that seemed to exude beneficence, and the clergyman, pressing it, ventured to murmur a suggestion.
“What, that Galahad Club again? Why, I thought my wife—Isabel, didn’t we—No? Well, it must have been my mother, then. Of course, you know, anything my good mother gives is—well—virtually—You haven’t asked her? Sure? I could have sworn; I get so many of these appeals. And in these times, you know, we have to go cautiously. I’m sure you recognize that yourself, Swordsley. With my obligations—here now, to show you don’t bear malice, have a brandy and soda before you go. Nonsense, man! This brandy isn’t liquor; it’s liqueur. I picked it up last year in London—last of a famous lot from Lord St. Oswyn’s cellar. Laid down here, it stood me at—Eh?” he broke off as his wife moved toward him. “Ah, yes, of course. Miss Lucy, Miss Agnes—a drop of soda-water? Look here, Addison, you won’t refuse my tipple, I know. Well, take a cigar, at any rate, Swordsley. And, by the way, I’m afraid you’ll have to go round the long way by the avenue tonight. Sorry, Mrs. Swordsley, but I forgot to tell them to leave the gate into the lane unlocked. Well, it’s a jolly night, and I daresay you won’t mind the extra turn along the lake. And, by Jove! if the moon’s out, you’ll have a glimpse of the motorboat. She’s moored just out beyond our boathouse; and it’s a privilege to look at her, I can tell you!”
*****
The dispersal of his guests carried Stilling out into the hall, where his pleasantries reverberated under the oak rafters while the Granger girls were being muffled for the drive and the carriages summoned from the stables.