Speaker 1: The readjustment by Mary Hunter Austen. Emma Jeffreys had been
dead and buried three days. This sister who had come
to the funeral had taken Emma's child away with her,
and the house was swept and dared. Then, when it
seemed there was the least occasion for it, Emma came back.
The neighbor woman who had nursed her was the first
to know it. It was about seven of the evening,
in a mellow gloom. The neighbor woman was sitting on
her own stoop with her arms wrapped in her apron,
and all at once she found herself going along the
street under an urgent sense that Emma needed her. She
was half way down the block before she recollected that
this was impossible for Missus Jeffreys was dead and buried.
But as soon as she came opposite the house she
was aware of what had happened. It was all open
to the summer, except that it was a little neater,
not otherwise than the rest of the street. It was
quite dark, but the presence of Emma Jeffreys streamed from
it and betrayed it more than a candle. It streamed
out steadily across the garden, and even as it reached her,
mixed with the smell of the damp Mignonette, the neighbor
woman owned to herself that she had always known Emma
would come back a sight stranger if she wouldn't, thought
the woman who had nursed her. She wasn't ever one
to throw off things easily. Emma Jeffreys had taken death
as she had taken everything in life. Hard. She had
met it with the same bright surface competency that she
had presented to the squalor of the encompassing desertness, to
the insuperable commonness of sim Jeffreys, to the affliction of
her crippled child, and the intensity of her wordless struggle
against it had caught the attention of the townspeople and
held it in a shocked, curious awe. She was so
long a dying, lying there in that little low house,
hearing the abhorred footsteps going about her rooms, and the
vulgar procedure of the community encroach upon her like the
advances of the sand wastes on an unwatered field. For
Emma had always wanted things different, wanted them with a
fury of intentness that implied offensiveness in things as they were,
and the townspeople had taken offense, the more so because
she was not to be surprised in any inaptitude for
their own kind of success. Do what you could. You
could never catch Emma Jeffreys in a wrapper after three
o'clock in the afternoon, and she would never talk about
the child. In a country where so little ever happened
that even trouble was a godsend if it gave you
something to talk about. It was reported that she did
not even talk to Sym. But there the common resentment
got back at her. If she had thought to effect
anything with sim Jeffreys, against the benumbing spirit of the place,
the evasive hopefulness, the large sense of leisure that ungirt
the loins, if she still hoped somehow to get away
with him to some place for which, by her dress,
by her manner, she seemed forever an unassailably fit. It
was foregone that nothing would come of it. They knew
Sim Jeffreys better than that. Yet so vivid had been
the force of her wordless dissatisfaction that when the fever
took her and she went down like a pasteboard figure
in the damp. The wonder was that nothing toppled with her,
and as if she too had felt herself indispensable. Emma
Jeffreys had come back. The neighbor woman crossed the street,
and as she passed the far corner of the garden,
Jeffreys spoke to her. He had been standing, she did
not know how long a time behind the syringa bush,
and moved even with her along the fence until they
came to the gate. She could see in the dusk
that before speaking he wet his lips with his tongue.
She's in there, he said at last, Emma. He nodded.
I've been sleeping at the store since, but I thought
i'd been more comfortable as soon as I opened the door,
there she was. Did you see her? No? How do
you know? Then? Don't you know? The neighbor felt there
was nothing to say to that. Come in, he whispered huskily.
They slipped by the rose tree and the wistaria and
sat down on the porch at the side. A door
swung inward behind them. They felt the presence in the
dusk beating like a pulse. What do you think she wants?
Said Jeffreys. Do you reckon. It's the boy like enough.
He's better off with his aunt. There was no one
here to take care of him like his mother wanted.
He raised his voice unconsciously with a note of justification,
addressing the room behind. I am sending fifty dollars a month,
he said, he can go with the best of them.
He went on at length to explain all the advantage
that was to come to the boy from living at Pasadena,
and the neighbor woman bore him out in it. He
was glad to go, urged Jeffreys to the room. He said,
it was what his mother would have wanted. They were
silent then a long time, while the presents seemed to
swell upon them and encroached upon the garden. Finally, I
gave Ziegler the order for the monument yesterday, Jeffreys threw
out appeasingly. It's to cost three hundred and fifty. The
presence stirred the neighbor thought she could fairly see the
controlled tolerance with which Emma Jeffreys endured the evidence of
Sym's ineptitudes. They sat on helplessly without talking after that,
until the woman's husband came to the fence and called
her don't go begged sym Hush, she said, do you
want all the town to know? You had naught but
good from Emma living and no call to expect harm
from her? Now, it's natural she should come back if
if she was lonesome, like in the place where she's
gone to, Emma wouldn't come back to this place, Jeffreys protested,
Without she wanted something, Well, then you've got to find out,
said the neighbor woman. All the next day she saw
whenever she passed the house that Emma was still there.
It was shut and barred, but the presence lurked behind
the folded blinds and fumbled at the doors. When it
was night and the moths began in the columbine under
the windows, it went out and walked in the garden.
Jeffreys was waiting at the gate when the neighbor woman came.
He sweated with helplessness in the warm dusk, and the
presence brooded upon them like an apprehension that grows by
being entertained. She wants something, he appealed. But I can't
make out what Emma knows. She is welcome to everything
I've got. Everybody knows I've been a good provider. The
neighbor woman remembered suddenly the only time she had ever
drawn close to Emma Jeffrey's touching the boy. They had
sat up with it together all one night, in some
childish ailment, and she had ventured a question, what does
his father think? And Emma had turned her a white,
hard face of surpassing dreariness. I don't know, she admitted.
He never says there's more than providing, suggested the neighbor woman. Yes,
there's feeling, but she had enough to do to put
up with me. I had no call to be troubling
her with such. He left off to mop his forehead
and began again feelings. He said, there's times a man
gets so war out with feelings he doesn't have them anymore.
He talked, and presently it grew clear to the woman
that he was voiding all the stuff of his life,
as if he had sickened on it and was now done.
It was a little soul knowing itself, and not good
to see. What was singular was that the presence, left
off walking in the garden, came and caught like a
gossamer on the ivy tree, swayed by the breath of
his broken sentences. He talked, and the neighbor woman saw
him for once as he saw himself, and Emma snared
and floundering in an inexplicable unhappiness. He had been disappointed too.
She had never relished the man he was, and it
made him ashamed. That was why he had never gone away,
lest he should make her ashamed among her own kind.
He was her husband. He could not help that, though
he was sorry for it, but he could keep the
offense where least was made of it. And there was
a child. She had wanted a child, But even then
he had blundered, begotten a cripple upon her. He blamed
himself utterly searched out the roots of his youth for
the answer to that, until the neighbor woman flinched to
hear him, But the presence stayed. He had never talked
to his wife about the child. How should he? There
was the fact, the advertisement of his incompetence, and she
had never talked to him. That was the one blessed
and unassailable memory. That she had spread silence like a
balm over his hurt in return for it. He had
never gone away. He had resisted her, that he might
save her from showing among her own kind how poor
a man he was. With every word of this ran
the fact of his love for her, as he had
loved her, with all the stripes of clean and uncleanness.
He bared himself as a child without knowing, And the
presence stayed. The talk trailed off at last to the
commonplaces of consolation between the wretchings of his spirit. The
presence lessened and streamed toward them on the wind of
the garden. When it touched them, like the warm air
of noon that lies sometimes in hollow places after nightfall,
the neighbor woman rose and went away. The next night.
She did not wait for him. When a rod outside
the town, it was a very little one. The burrowing
owls woo wooed. She hung up her apron and went
to talk with Emma Jeffrey's. The presence was there, drawn
in lying close. She found the key between the wistaria
and the first pillar of the porch. But as soon
as she opened the door she felt the chill that
might be expected by one intruding on Emma Jeffreys in
her own house. The Lord is my shepherd, said the
neighbor woman. It was the first religious phrase that occurred
to her. Then she said the whole of the psalm,
and after that a hymn. She had come in through
the door and stood with her back to it and
her hand upon the knob. Everything was just as Missus
Jeffreys had left it, with the waiting air of a
room kept for company. M. She said boldly, when the
chill had abated a little before the sacred words. M. Jeffreys.
I've got something to say to you, and you've got
to hear. She added with firmness, as the white curtains
stood duskily at the window. You wouldn't be talked too
about your troubles when you were here before, and we
humored you. But now there is Sym to be thought of.
I guess you heard what you came for last night
and got good of it. Maybe it would have been
better if Sym had said things all along instead of
hoarding them in his heart, but anyway he has said
them now. And what I want to say is if
you was staying on with the hope of hearing it again,
you'd be making a mistake. You was an uncommon woman,
Emma Jeffreys, and there didn't none of us understand you
very well, nor do you. Justice may be, but sim
is only a common man, and I understand him because
I'm that way myself. And if you think he'll be
opening his heart to you every night, or be any
different from what he's always been on account of what's happened,
that's a mistake too. And in a little while, if
you stay, it will be as bad as it always was.
Men are like that. You'd better go now while there's
understanding between you. She stood, staring into the darkling room
that seemed suddenly full of turbulence and denial. It seemed
to beat upon her and take her breath, but she
held on, You've got to go, m and I'm going
to stay until you do. She said this with finality,
and then began again. The Lord is nigh unto them,
let her of a broken heart, and repeated the passage
to the end. Then, as the presence sank before it,
you better go, Emma, persuasively, and again, after an interval,
He shall deliver thee in six troubles, yea, in seven
shall no evil touch thee. The presence gathered itself and
was still. She could make out that it stood over
against the opposite corner by the guilt easel with the
crayon portrait of the child. For thou shalt forget thy misery,
thou shalt remember it as waters that are passed, concluded
the neighbor woman, as she heard Jeffreys on the gravel outside.
What the presence had wrought upon him in the night
was visible in his altered mien. He looked more than
anything else to be in need of sleep. He had
eaten his sorrow, and that was the end of it,
as it is with men. I came to see if
there was anything I could do for you, said the
woman neighborly, with her hand upon the door. I don't
know as there is, said he. I'm much obliged, but
I don't know as there is, you see, whispered the
woman over her shoulder, not even to me. She felt
the tug of her heart as the presence swept past her.
The neighbor went out after that and walked in the
ragged street, past the school house, across the creek, below
the town, out by the fields, over the head gate,
and back by the town again. It was full nine
of the clock when she passed the Jeffreys house. It looked,
except for being a little neater, no other than the
rest of the street. The door was open and the
lamp was lit. She saw Jeffreys black against it. He
sat reading a book, like a man at ease in
his own house. And of the Readjustment by Mary Hunter
Austin