[Part 18] "Gone With The Wind" by Margaret Mitchell

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𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐗𝐗𝐗𝐕𝐈𝐈.

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IT WAS ON A WILD WET NIGHT IN APRIL that Tony Fontaine rode in from Jonesboro on a lathered horse that was half dead from exhaustion and came knocking at their door, rousing her and Frank from sleep with their hearts in their throats.

Then for the second time in four months, Scarlett was made to feel acutely what Reconstruction in all its implications meant, made to understand more completely what was in Will’s mind when he said “Our troubles have just begun,” to know that the bleak words of Ashley, spoken in the wind-swept orchard of Tara, were true: “This that’s facing all of us is worse than war—worse than prison—worse than death.”

The first time she had come face to face with Reconstruction was when she learned that Jonas Wilkerson with the aid of the Yankees could evict her from Tara.

But Tony’s advent brought it all home to her in a far more terrifying manner.

Tony came in the dark and the lashing rain and in a few minutes he was gone back into the night forever, but in the brief interval between he raised the curtain on a scene of new horror, a curtain that she felt hopelessly would never be lowered again.

That stormy night when the knocker hammered on the door with such hurried urgency, she stood on the landing, clutching her wrapper to her and, looking down into the hall below, had one glimpse of Tony’s swarthy saturnine face before he leaned forward and blew out the candle in Frank’s hand.

She hurried down in the darkness to grasp his cold wet hand and hear him whisper: “They’re after me—going to Texas—my horse is about dead—and I’m about starved.

Ashley said you’d—

Don’t light the candle!

Don’t wake the darkies….

I don’t want to get you folks in trouble if I can help it.”

With the kitchen blinds drawn and all the shades pulled down to the sills, he permitted a light and he talked to Frank in swift jerky sentences as Scarlett hurried about, trying to scrape together a meal for him.

He was without a greatcoat and soaked to the skin.

He was hatless and his black hair was plastered to his little skull.

But the merriment of the Fontaine boys, a chilling merriment that night, was in his little dancing eyes as he gulped down the whisky she brought him.

Scarlett thanked God that Aunt Pittypat was snoring undisturbed upstairs.

She would certainly swoon if she saw this apparition.

“One damned bast—Scallawag less,” said Tony, holding out his glass for another drink.

“I’ve ridden hard and it’ll cost me my skin if I don’t get out of here quick, but it was worth it.

By God, yes!

I’m going to try to get to Texas and lay low there.

Ashley was with me in Jonesboro and he told me to come to you all.

Got to have another horse, Frank, and some money.

My horse is nearly dead—all the way up here at a dead run—and like a fool I went out of the house today like a bat out of hell without a coat or hat or a cent of money.

Not that there’s much money in our house.”

He laughed and applied himself hungrily to the cold corn pone and cold turnip greens on which congealed grease was thick in white flakes.

“You can have my horse,” said Frank calmly.

“I’ve only ten dollars with me but if you can wait till morning—”

“Hell’s afire, I can’t wait!” said Tony emphatically but jovially.

“They’re probably right behind me.

I didn’t get much of a start.

If it hadn’t been for Ashley dragging me out of there and making me get on my horse, I’d have stayed there like a fool and probably had my neck stretched by now.

Good fellow, Ashley.”

So Ashley was mixed up in this frightening puzzle.

Scarlett went cold, her hand at her throat.

Did the Yankees have Ashley now?

Why, why didn’t Frank ask what it was all about?

Why did he take it all so coolly, so much as a matter of course?

She struggled to get the question to her lips.

“What—” she began.

“Who—”

“Your father’s old overseer—that damned—Jonas Wilkerson.”

“Did you—is he dead?”

“My God, Scarlett O’Hara!” said Tony peevishly.

“When I start out to cut somebody up, you don’t think I’d be satisfied with scratching him with the blunt side of my knife, do you?

No, by God, I cut him to ribbons.”

“Good,” said Frank casually.

“I never liked the fellow.”

Scarlett looked at him.

This was not the meek Frank she knew, the nervous beard clawer who she had learned could be bullied with such ease.

There was an air about him that was crisp and cool and he was meeting the emergency with no unnecessary words.

He was a man and Tony was a man and this situation of violence was men’s business in which a woman had no part.

“But Ashley—

Did he—”

“No.

He wanted to kill him but I told him it was my right, because Sally is my sister-in-law, and he saw reason finally.

He went into Jonesboro with me, in case Wilkerson got me first.

But I don’t think old Ash will get in any trouble about it.

I hope not.

Got any jam for this corn pone?

And can you wrap me up something to take with me?”

“I shall scream if you don’t tell me everything.”

“Wait till I’ve gone and then scream if you’ve got to.

I’ll tell you about it while Frank saddles the horse.

That damned—Wilkerson has caused enough trouble already.

You know how he did you about your taxes.

That’s just one of his meannesses.

But the worst thing was the way he kept the darkies stirred up.

If anybody had told me I’d ever live to see the day when I’d hate darkies!

Damn their black souls, they believe anything those scoundrels tell them and forget every living thing we’ve done for them.

Now the Yankees are talking about letting the darkies vote.

And they won’t let us vote.

Why, there’s hardly a handful of Democrats in the whole County who aren’t barred from voting, now that they’ve ruled out every man who fought in the Confederate Army.

And if they give the negroes the vote, it’s the end of us.

Damn it, it’s our state!

It doesn’t belong to the Yankees!

By God, Scarlett, it isn’t to be borne!

And it won’t be borne!

We’ll do something about it if it means another war.

Soon we’ll be having nigger judges, nigger legislators—black apes out of the jungle—”

“Please—hurry, tell me!

What did you do?”

“Give me another mite of that pone before you wrap it up.

Well, the word got around that Wilkerson had gone a bit too far with his nigger-equality business.

Oh, yes, he talks it to those black fools by the hour.

He had the gall—the—” Tony spluttered helplessly, “to say niggers had a right to—to—white women.”

“Oh, Tony, no!”

“By God, yes!

I don’t wonder you look sick.

But hell’s afire, Scarlett, it can’t be news to you.

They’ve been telling it to them here in Atlanta.”

“I—I didn’t know.”

“Well, Frank would have kept it from you.

Anyway, after that, we all sort of thought we’d call on Mr. Wilkerson privately by night and tend to him, but before we could—You remember that black buck, Eustis, who used to be our foreman?”

“Yes.”

“Came to the kitchen door today while Sally was fixing dinner and—I don’t know what he said to her.

I guess I’ll never know.

But he said something and I heard her scream and I ran into the kitchen and there he was, drunk as a fiddler’s bitch—I beg your pardon, Scarlett, it just slipped out.”

“Go on.”

“I shot him and when Mother ran in to take care of Sally, I got my horse and started to Jonesboro for Wilkerson.

He was the one to blame.

The damned black fool would never have thought of it but for him.

And on the way past Tara, I met Ashley and, of course, he went with me.

He said to let him do it because of the way Wilkerson acted about Tara and I said No, it was my place because Sally was my own dead brother’s wife, and he went with me arguing the whole way.

And when we got to town, by God, Scarlett, do you know I hadn’t even brought my pistol.

I’d left it in the stable.

So mad I forgot—”

He paused and gnawed the tough pone and Scarlett shivered.

The murderous rages of the Fontaines had made County history long before this chapter had opened.

“So I had to take my knife to him.

I found him in the barroom.

I got him in a corner with Ashley holding back the others and I told him why before I lit into him.

Why, it was over before I knew it,” said Tony reflecting.

“First thing I knew, Ashley had me on my horse and told me to come to you folks.

Ashley’s a good man in a pinch.

He keeps his head.”

Frank came in, his greatcoat over his arm, and handed it to Tony.

It was his only heavy coat but Scarlett made no protest.

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She seemed so much on the outside of this affair, this purely masculine affair.

“But Tony—they need you at home.

Surely, if you went back and explained—”

“Frank, you’ve married a fool,” said Tony with a grin, struggling into the coat.

“She thinks the Yankees will reward a man for keeping niggers off his women folks.

So they will, with a drumhead court and a rope.

Give me a kiss, Scarlett.

Frank won’t mind and I may never see you again.

Texas is a long way off.

I won’t dare write, so let the home folks know I got this far in safety.”

She let him kiss her and the two men went out into the driving rain and stood for a moment, talking on the back porch.

Then she heard a sudden splashing of hooves and Tony was gone.

She opened the door a crack and saw Frank leading a heaving, stumbling horse into the carriage house.

She shut the door again and sat down, her knees trembling.

Now she knew what Reconstruction meant, knew as well as if the house were ringed about by naked savages, squatting in breech clouts.

Now there came rushing to her mind many things to which she had given little thought recently, conversations she had heard but to which she had not listened, masculine talk which had been checked half finished when she came into rooms, small incidents in which she had seen no significance at the time, Frank’s futile warnings to her against driving out to the mill with only the feeble Uncle Peter to protect her.

Now they fitted themselves together into one horrifying picture.

The negroes were on top and behind them were the Yankee bayonets.

She could be killed, she could be raped and, very probably, nothing would ever be done about it.

And anyone who avenged her would be hanged by the Yankees, hanged without benefit of trial by judge and jury.

Yankee officers who knew nothing of law and cared less for the circumstances of the crime could go through the motions of holding a trial and put a rope around a Southerner’s neck.

“What can we do?” she thought, wringing her hands in an agony of helpless fear.

“What can we do with devils who’d hang a nice boy like Tony just for killing a drunken buck and a scoundrelly Scallawag to protect his women folks?”

“It isn’t to be borne!” Tony had cried and he was right.

It couldn’t be borne.

But what could they do except bear it, helpless as they were?

She fell to trembling and, for the first time in her life, she saw people and events as something apart from herself, saw clearly that Scarlett O’Hara, frightened and helpless, was not all that mattered.

There were thousands of women like her, all over the South, who were frightened and helpless.

And thousands of men, who had laid down their arms at Appomattox, had taken them up again and stood ready to risk their necks on a minute’s notice to protect those women.

There had been something in Tony’s face which had been mirrored in Frank’s, an expression she had seen recently on the faces of other men in Atlanta, a look she had noticed but had not troubled to analyze.

It was an expression vastly different from the tired helplessness she had seen in the faces of men coming home from the war after the surrender.

Those men had not cared about anything except getting home.

Now they were caring about something again, numbed nerves were coming back to life and the old spirit was beginning to burn.

They were caring again with a cold ruthless bitterness.

And, like Tony, they were thinking: “It isn’t to be borne!”

She had seen Southern men, soft voiced and dangerous in the days before the war, reckless and hard in the last despairing days of the fighting.

But in the faces of the two men who stared at each other across the candle flame so short a while ago there had been something that was different, something that heartened her but frightened her—fury which could find no words, determination which would stop at nothing.

For the first time, she felt a kinship with the people about her, felt one with them in their fears, their bitterness, their determination.

No, it wasn’t to be borne!

The South was too beautiful a place to be let go without a struggle, too loved to be trampled by Yankees who hated Southerners enough to enjoy grinding them into the dirt, too dear a homeland to be turned over to ignorant negroes drunk with whisky and freedom.

As she thought of Tony’s sudden entrance and swift exit, she felt herself akin to him, for she remembered the old story how her father had left Ireland, left hastily and by night, after a murder which was no murder to him or to his family.

Gerald’s blood was in her, violent blood.

She remembered her hot joy in shooting the marauding Yankee.

Violent blood was in them all, perilously close to the surface, lurking just beneath the kindly courteous exteriors.

All of them, all the men she knew, even the drowsy-eyed Ashley and fidgety old Frank, were like that underneath—murderous, violent if the need arose.

Even Rhett, conscienceless scamp that he was, had killed a negro for being “uppity to a lady.”

When Frank came in dripping with rain and coughing, she leaped to her feet.

“Oh, Frank, how long will it be like this?”

“As long as the Yankees hate us so, Sugar.”

“Is there nothing anybody can do?”

Frank passed a tired hand over his wet beard.

“We are doing things.”

“What?”

“Why talk of them till we have accomplished something?

It may take years.

Perhaps—perhaps the South will always be like this.”

“Oh, no!”

“Sugar, come to bed.

You must be chilled.

You are shaking.”

“When will it all end?”

“When we can all vote again, Sugar.

When every man who fought for the South can put a ballot in the box for a Southerner and a Democrat.”

“A ballot?” she cried despairingly.

“What good’s a ballot when the darkies have lost their minds—when the Yankees have poisoned them against us?”

Frank went on to explain in his patient manner, but the idea that ballots would cure the trouble was too complicated for her to follow.

She was thinking gratefully that Jonas Wilkerson would never again be a menace to Tara and she was thinking about Tony.

“Oh, the poor Fontaines!” she exclaimed.

“Only Alex left and so much to do at Mimosa.

Why didn’t Tony have sense enough to—to do it at night when no one would know who it was?

A sight more good he’d do helping with the spring plowing than in Texas.”

Frank put an arm about her.

Usually he was gingerly when he did this, as if he anticipated being impatiently shaken off, but tonight there was a far-off look in his eyes and his arm was firm about her waist.

“There are things more important now than plowing, Sugar.

And scaring the darkies and teaching the Scallawags a lesson is one of them.

As long as there are fine boys like Tony left, I guess we won’t need to worry about the South too much.

Come to bed.”

“But, Frank—”

“If we just stand together and don’t give an inch to the Yankees, we’ll win, some day.

Don’t you bother your pretty head about it, Sugar.

You let your men folks worry about it.

Maybe it won’t come in our time, but surely it will come some day.

The Yankees will get tired of pestering us when they see they can’t even dent us, and then we’ll have a decent world to live in and raise our children in.”

She thought of Wade and the secret she had carried silently for some days.

No, she didn’t want her children raised in this welter of hate and uncertainty, of bitterness and violence lurking just below the surface, of poverty and grinding hardships and insecurity.

She never wanted children of hers to know what all this was like.

She wanted a secure and well-ordered world in which she could look forward and know there was a safe future ahead for them, a world where her children would know only softness and warmth and good clothes and fine food.

Frank thought this could be accomplished by voting.

Voting?

What did votes matter?

Nice people in the South would never have the vote again.

There was only one thing in the world that was a certain bulwark against any calamity which fate could bring, and that was money.

She thought feverishly that they must have money, lots of it to keep them safe against disaster.

Abruptly, she told him she was going to have a baby.

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For weeks after Tony’s escape, Aunt Pitty’s house was subjected to repeated searches by parties of Yankee soldiers.

They invaded the house at all hours and without warning.

They swarmed through the rooms, asking questions, opening closets, prodding clothes hampers, peering under beds.

The military authorities had heard that Tony had been advised to go to Miss Pitty’s house, and they were certain he was still hiding there or somewhere in the neighborhood.

As a result, Aunt Pitty was chronically in what Uncle Peter called a “state,” never knowing when her bedroom would be entered by an officer and a squad of men.

Neither Frank nor Scarlett had mentioned Tony’s brief visit, so the old lady could have revealed nothing, even had she been so inclined.

She was entirely honest in her fluttery protestations that she had seen Tony Fontaine only once in her life and that was at Christmas time in 1862.

“And,” she would add breathlessly to the Yankee soldiers, in an effort to be helpful, “he was quite intoxicated at the time.”

Scarlett, sick and miserable in the early stage of pregnancy, alternated between a passionate hatred of the bluecoats who invaded her privacy, frequently carrying away any little knickknack that appealed to them, and an equally passionate fear that Tony might prove the undoing of them all.

The prisons were full of people who had been arrested for much less reason.

She knew that if one iota of the truth were proved against them, not only she and Frank but the innocent Pitty as well would go to jail.

For some time there had been an agitation in Washington to confiscate all “Rebel property” to pay the United States’ war debt and this agitation had kept Scarlett in a state of anguished apprehension.

Now, in addition to this, Atlanta was full of wild rumors about the confiscation of property of offenders against military law, and Scarlett quaked lest she and Frank lose not only their freedom but the house, the store and the mill.

And even if their property were not appropriated by the military, it would be as good as lost if she and Frank went to jail, for who would look after their business in their absence?

She hated Tony for bringing such trouble upon them.

How could he have done such a thing to friends?

And how could Ashley have sent Tony to them?

Never again would she give aid to anyone if it meant having the Yankees come down on her like a swarm of hornets.

No, she would bar the door against anyone needing her help.

Except, of course, Ashley.

For weeks after Tony’s brief visit she woke from uneasy dreams at any sound in the road outside, fearing it might be Ashley trying to make his escape, fleeing to Texas because of the aid he had given Tony.

She did not know how matters stood with him, for they did not dare write to Tara about Tony’s midnight visit.

Their letters might be intercepted by the Yankees and bring trouble upon the plantation as well.

But, when weeks went by and they heard no bad news, they knew that Ashley had somehow come clear.

And finally, the Yankees ceased annoying them.

But even this relief did not free Scarlett from the state of dread which began when Tony came knocking at their door, a dread which was worse than the quaking fear of the siege shells, worse even than the terror of Sherman’s men during the last days of the war.

It was as if Tony’s appearance that wild rainy night had stripped merciful blinders from her eyes and forced her to see the true uncertainty of her life.

Looking about her in that cold spring of 1866, Scarlett realized what was facing her and the whole South.

She might plan and scheme, she might work harder than her slaves had ever worked, she might succeed in overcoming all of her hardships, she might through dint of determination solve problems for which her earlier life had provided no training at all.

But for all her labor and sacrifice and resourcefulness, her small beginnings purchased at so great a cost might be snatched away from her at any minute.

And should this happen, she had no legal rights, no legal redress, except those same drumhead courts of which Tony had spoken so bitterly, those military courts with their arbitrary powers.

Only the negroes had rights or redress these days.

The Yankees had the South prostrate and they intended to keep it so.

The South had been tilted as by a giant malicious hand, and those who had once ruled were now more helpless than their former slaves had ever been.

Georgia was heavily garrisoned with troops and Atlanta had more than its share.

The commandants of the Yankee troops in the various cities had complete power, even the power of life and death, over the civilian population, and they used that power.

They could and did imprison citizens for any cause, or no cause, seize their property, hang them.

They could and did harass and hamstring them with conflicting regulations about the operation of their business, the wages they must pay their servants, what they should say in public and private utterances and what they should write in newspapers.

They regulated how, when and where they must dump their garbage and they decided what songs the daughters and wives of ex-Confederates could sing, so that the singing of “Dixie” or “Bonnie Blue Flag” became an offense only a little less serious than treason.

They ruled that no one could get a letter out of the post office without taking the Iron Clad oath and, in some instances, they even prohibited the issuance of marriage licenses unless the couples had taken the hated oath.

The newspapers were so muzzled that no public protest could be raised against the injustices or depredations of the military, and individual protests were silenced with jail sentences.

The jails were full of prominent citizens and there they stayed without hope of early trial.

Trial by jury and the law of habeas corpus were practically suspended.

The civil courts still functioned after a fashion but they functioned at the pleasure of the military, who could and did interfere with their verdicts, so that citizens so unfortunate as to get arrested were virtually at the mercy of the military authorities.

And so many did get arrested.

The very suspicion of seditious utterances against the government, suspected complicity in the Ku Klux Klan, or complaint by a negro that a white man had been uppity to him were enough to land a citizen in jail.

Proof and evidence were not needed.

The accusation was sufficient.

And thanks to the incitement of the Freedmen’s Bureau, negroes could always be found who were willing to bring accusations.

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The negroes had not yet been given the right to vote but the North was determined that they should vote and equally determined that their vote should be friendly to the North.

With this in mind, nothing was too good for the negroes.

The Yankee soldiers backed them up in anything they chose to do, and the surest way for a white person to get himself into trouble was to bring a complaint of any kind against a negro.

The former slaves were now the lords of creation and, with the aid of the Yankees, the lowest and most ignorant ones were on top.

The better class of them, scorning freedom, were suffering as severely as their white masters.

Thousands of house servants, the highest caste in the slave population, remained with their white folks, doing manual labor which had been beneath them in the old days.

Many loyal field hands also refused to avail themselves of the new freedom, but the hordes of “trashy free issue niggers,” who were causing most of the trouble, were drawn largely from the field-hand class.

In slave days, these lowly blacks had been despised by the house negroes and yard negroes as creatures of small worth.

Just as Ellen had done, other plantation mistresses throughout the South had put the pickaninnies through courses of training and elimination to select the best of them for the positions of greater responsibility.

Those consigned to the fields were the ones least willing or able to learn, the least energetic, the least honest and trustworthy, the most vicious and brutish.

And now this class, the lowest in the black social order, was making life a misery for the South.

Aided by the unscrupulous adventurers who operated the Freedmen’s Bureau and urged on by a fervor of Northern hatred almost religious in its fanaticism, the former field hands found themselves suddenly elevated to the seats of the mighty.

There they conducted themselves as creatures of small intelligence might naturally be expected to do.

Like monkeys or small children turned loose among treasured objects whose value is beyond their comprehension, they ran wild—either from perverse pleasure in destruction or simply because of their ignorance.

To the credit of the negroes, including the least intelligent of them, few were actuated by malice and those few had usually been “mean niggers” even in slave days.

But they were, as a class, childlike in mentality, easily led and from long habit accustomed to taking orders.

Formerly their white masters had given the orders.

Now they had a new set of masters, the Bureau and the Carpetbaggers, and their orders were: “You’re just as good as any white man, so act that way.

Just as soon as you can vote the Republican ticket, you are going to have the white man’s property.

It’s as good as yours now.

Take it, if you can get it!”

Dazzled by these tales, freedom became a never-ending picnic, a barbecue every day of the week, a carnival of idleness and theft and insolence.

Country negroes flocked into the cities, leaving the rural districts without labor to make the crops.

Atlanta was crowded with them and still they came by the hundreds, lazy and dangerous as a result of the new doctrines being taught them.

Packed into squalid cabins, smallpox, typhoid and tuberculosis broke out among them.

Accustomed to the care of their mistresses when they were ill in slave days, they did not know how to nurse themselves or their sick.

Relying upon their masters in the old days to care for their aged and their babies, they now had no sense of responsibility for their helpless.

And the Bureau was far too interested in political matters to provide the care the plantation owners had once given.

Abandoned negro children ran like frightened animals about the town until kind-hearted white people took them into their kitchens to raise.

Aged country darkies, deserted by their children, bewildered and panic stricken in the bustling town, sat on the curbs and cried to the ladies who passed: “Mistis, please Ma’m, write mah old Marster down in Fayette County dat Ah’s up hyah.

He’ll come tek dis ole nigger home agin.

’Fo’ Gawd, Ah done got nuff of dis freedom!”

The Freedmen’s Bureau, overwhelmed by the numbers who poured in upon them, realized too late a part of the mistake and tried to send them back to their former owners.

They told the negroes that if they would go back, they would go as free workers, protected by written contracts specifying wages by the day.

The old darkies went back to the plantations gladly, making a heavier burden than ever on the poverty-stricken planters who had not the heart to turn them out, but the young ones remained in Atlanta.

They did not want to be workers of any kind, anywhere.

Why work when the belly is full?

For the first time in their lives the negroes were able to get all the whisky they might want.

In slave days, it was something they never tasted except at Christmas, when each one received a “drap” along with his gift.

Now they had not only the Bureau agitators and the Carpetbaggers urging them on, but the incitement of whisky as well, and outrages were inevitable.

Neither life nor property was safe from them and the white people, unprotected by law, were terrorized.

Men were insulted on the streets by drunken blacks, houses and barns were burned at night, horses and cattle and chickens stolen in broad daylight, crimes of all varieties were committed and few of the perpetrators were brought to justice.

But these ignominies and dangers were as nothing compared with the peril of white women, many bereft by the war of male protection, who lived alone in the outlying districts and on lonely roads.

It was the large number of outrages on women and the ever-present fear for the safety of their wives and daughters that drove Southern men to cold and trembling fury and caused the Ku Klux Klan to spring up overnight.

And it was against this nocturnal organization that the newspapers of the North cried out most loudly, never realizing the tragic necessity that brought it into being.

The North wanted every member of the Ku Klux hunted down and hanged, because they had dared take the punishment of crime into their own hands at a time when the ordinary processes of law and order had been overthrown by the invaders.

Here was the astonishing spectacle of half a nation attempting, at the point of bayonet, to force upon the other half the rule of negroes, many of them scarcely one generation out of the African jungles.

The vote must be given to them but it must be denied to most of their former owners.

The South must be kept down and disfranchisement of the whites was one way to keep the South down.

Most of those who had fought for the Confederacy, held office under it or given aid and comfort to it were not allowed to vote, had no choice in the selection of their public officials and were wholly under the power of an alien rule.

Many men, thinking soberly of General Lee’s words and example, wished to take the oath, become citizens again and forget the past.

But they were not permitted to take it.

Others who were permitted to take the oath, hotly refused to do so, scorning to swear allegiance to a government which was deliberately subjecting them to cruelty and humiliation.

Scarlett heard over and over until she could have screamed at the repetition: “I’d have taken their damned oath right after the surrender if they’d acted decent.

I can be restored to the Union, but by God, I can’t be reconstructed into it!”

Through the anxious days and nights, Scarlett was torn with fear.

The ever-present menace of lawless negroes and Yankee soldiers preyed on her mind, the danger of confiscation was constantly with her, even in her dreams, and she dreaded worse terrors to come.

Depressed by the helplessness of herself and her friends, of the whole South, it was not strange that she often remembered during these days the words which Tony Fontaine had spoken so passionately:

“By God, Scarlett, it isn’t to be borne!

And it won’t be borne!”

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In spite of war, fire and Reconstruction, Atlanta had again become a boom town.

In many ways, the place resembled the busy young city of the Confederacy’s early days.

The only trouble was that the soldiers crowding the streets wore the wrong kind of uniforms, the money was in the hands of the wrong people, and the negroes were living in leisure while their former masters struggled and starved.

Underneath the surface were misery and fear, but all the outward appearances were those of a thriving town that was rapidly rebuilding from its ruins, a bustling, hurrying town.

Atlanta, it seemed, must always be hurrying, no matter what its circumstances might be.

Savannah, Charleston, Augusta, Richmond, New Orleans would never hurry.

It was ill bred and Yankeefied to hurry.

But in this period, Atlanta was more ill bred and Yankeefied than it had ever been before or would ever be again.

With new people thronging in from all directions, the streets were choked and noisy from morning till night.

The shiny carriages of Yankee officers’ wives and newly rich Carpetbaggers splashed mud on the dilapidated buggies of the townspeople, and gaudy new homes of wealthy strangers crowded in among the sedate dwellings of older citizens.

The war had definitely established the importance of Atlanta in the affairs of the South and the hitherto obscure town was now known far and wide.

The railroads for which Sherman had fought an entire summer and killed thousands of men were again stimulating the life of the city they had brought into being.

Atlanta was again the center of activities for a wide region, as it had been before its destruction, and the town was receiving a great influx of new citizens, both welcome and unwelcome.

Invading Carpetbaggers made Atlanta their headquarters and on the streets they jostled against representatives of the oldest families in the South who were likewise newcomers in the town.

Families from the country districts who had been burned out during Sherman’s march and who could no longer make a living without the slaves to till the cotton had come to Atlanta to live.

New settlers were coming in every day from Tennessee and the Carolinas where the hand of Reconstruction lay even heavier than in Georgia.

Many Irish and Germans who had been bounty men in the Union Army had settled in Atlanta after their discharge.

The wives and families of the Yankee garrison, filled with curiosity about the South after four years of war, came to swell the population.

Adventurers of every kind swarmed in, hoping to make their fortunes, and the negroes from the country continued to come by the hundreds.

The town was roaring—wide open like a frontier village, making no effort to cover its vices and sins.

Saloons blossomed overnight, two and sometimes three in a block, and after nightfall the streets were full of drunken men, black and white, reeling from wall to curb and back again.

Thugs, pickpockets and prostitutes lurked in the unlit alleys and shadowy streets.

Gambling houses ran full blast and hardly a night passed without its shooting or cutting affray.

Respectable citizens were scandalized to find that Atlanta had a large and thriving red-light district, larger and more thriving than during the war.

All night long pianos jangled from behind drawn shades and rowdy songs and laughter floated out, punctuated by occasional screams and pistol shots.

The inmates of these houses were bolder than the prostitutes of the war days and brazenly hung out of their windows and called to passers-by.

And on Sunday afternoons, the handsome closed carriages of the madams of the district rolled down the main streets, filled with girls in their best finery, taking the air from behind lowered silk shades.

Belle Watling was the most notorious of the madams.

She had opened a new house of her own, a large two-story building that made neighboring houses in the district look like shabby rabbit warrens.

There was a long barroom downstairs, elegantly hung with oil paintings, and a negro orchestra played every night.

The upstairs, so rumor said, was fitted out with the finest of plush upholstered furniture, heavy lace curtains and imported mirrors in gilt frames.

The dozen young ladies with whom the house was furnished were comely, if brightly painted, and comported themselves more quietly than those of other houses.

At least, the police were seldom summoned to Belle’s.

This house was something that the matrons of Atlanta whispered about furtively and ministers preached against in guarded terms as a cesspool of iniquity, a hissing and a reproach.

Everyone knew that a woman of Belle’s type couldn’t have made enough money by herself to set up such a luxurious establishment.

She had to have a backer and a rich one at that.

And Rhett Butler had never had the decency to conceal his relations with her, so it was obvious that he and no other must be that backer.

Belle herself presented a prosperous appearance when glimpsed occasionally in her closed carriage driven by an impudent yellow negro.

When she drove by, behind a fine pair of bays, all the little boys along the street who could evade their mothers ran to peer at her and whisper excitedly: “That’s her!

That’s ole Belle!

I seen her red hair!”

Shouldering the shell-pitted houses patched with bits of old lumber and smoke-blackened bricks, the fine homes of the Carpetbaggers and war profiteers were rising, with mansard roofs, gables and turrets, stained-glass windows and wide lawns.

Night after night, in these newly built homes, the windows were ablaze with gas light and the sound of music and dancing feet drifted out upon the air.

Women in stiff bright-colored silks strolled about long verandas, squired by men in evening clothes.

Champagne corks popped, and on lace tableclothes seven-course dinners were laid.

Hams in wine, pressed duck, pâté de foie gras, rare fruits in and out of season, were spread in profusion.

Behind the shabby doors of the old houses, poverty and hunger lived—all the more bitter for the brave gentility with which they were borne, all the more pinching for the outward show of proud indifference to material wants.

Dr. Meade could tell unlovely stories of those families who had been driven from mansions to boarding houses and from boarding houses to dingy rooms on back streets.

He had too many lady patients who were suffering from “weak hearts” and “declines.”

He knew, and they knew he knew, that slow starvation was the trouble.

He could tell of consumption making inroads on entire families and of pellagra, once found only among poor whites, which was now appearing in Atlanta’s best families.

And there were babies with thin rickety legs and mothers who could not nurse them.

Once the old doctor had been wont to thank God reverently for each child he brought into the world.

Now he did not think life was such a boon.

It was a hard world for little babies and so many died in their first few months of life.

Bright lights and wine, fiddles and dancing, brocade and broadcloth in the showy big houses and, just around the corners, slow starvation and cold.

Arrogance and callousness for the conquerors, bitter endurance and hatred for the conquered.

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𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐏𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐗𝐗𝐗𝐕𝐈𝐈𝐈.

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SCARLETT SAW IT ALL, lived with it by day, took it to bed with her at night, dreading always what might happen next.

She knew that she and Frank were already in the Yankees’ black books, because of Tony, and disaster might descend on them at any hour.

But, now of all times, she could not afford to be pushed back to her beginnings—not now with a baby coming, the mill just commencing to pay and Tara depending on her for money until the cotton came in in the fall.

Oh, suppose she should lose everything!

Suppose she should have to start all over again with only her puny weapons against this mad world!

To have to pit her red lips and green eyes and her shrewd shallow brain against the Yankees and everything the Yankees stood for.

Weary with dread, she felt that she would rather kill herself than try to make a new beginning.

In the ruin and chaos of that spring of 1866, she single mindedly turned her energies to making the mill pay.

There was money in Atlanta.

The wave of rebuilding was giving her the opportunity she wanted and she knew she could make money if only she could stay out of jail.

But, she told herself time and again, she would have to walk easily, gingerly, be meek under insults, yielding to injustices, never giving offense to anyone, black or white, who might do her harm.

She hated the impudent free negroes as much as anyone and her flesh crawled with fury every time she heard their insulting remarks and high-pitched laughter as she went by.

But she never even gave them a glance of contempt.

She hated the Carpetbaggers and Scallawags who were getting rich with ease while she struggled, but she said nothing in condemnation of them.

No one in Atlanta could have loathed the Yankees more than she, for the very sight of a blue uniform made her sick with rage, but even in the privacy of her family she kept silent about them.

I won’t be a big-mouthed fool, she thought grimly.

Let others break their hearts over the old days and the men who’ll never come back.

Let others burn with fury over the Yankee rule and losing the ballot.

Let others go to jail for speaking their minds and get themselves hanged for being in the Ku Klux Klan.

(Oh, what a dreaded name that was, almost as terrifying to Scarlett as to the negroes.)

Let other women be proud that their husbands belonged.

Thank God, Frank had never been mixed up in it!

Let others stew and fume and plot and plan about things they could not help.

What did the past matter compared with the tense present and the dubious future?

What did the ballot matter when bread, a roof and staying out of jail were the real problems?

And, please God, just let me stay out of trouble until June!

Only till June!

By that month Scarlett knew she would be forced to retire into Aunt Pitty’s house and remain secluded there until after her child was born.

Already people were criticizing her for appearing in public when she was in such a condition.

No lady ever showed herself when she was pregnant.

Already Frank and Pitty were begging her not to expose herself—and them—to embarrassment and she had promised them to stop work in June.

Only till June!

By June she must have the mill well enough established for her to leave it.

By June she must have money enough to give her at least some little protection against misfortune.

So much to do and so little time to do it!

She wished for more hours of the day and counted the minutes, as she strained forward feverishly in her pursuit of money and still more money.

Because she nagged the timid Frank, the store was doing better now and he was even collecting some of the old bills.

But it was the sawmill on which her hopes were pinned.

Atlanta these days was like a giant plant which had been cut to the ground but now was springing up again with sturdier shoots, thicker foliage, more numerous branches.

The demand for building materials was far greater than could be supplied.

Prices of lumber, brick and stone soared and Scarlett kept the mill running from dawn until lantern light.

A part of every day she spent at the mill, prying into everything, doing her best to check the thievery she felt sure was going on.

But most of the time she was riding about the town, making the rounds of builders, contractors and carpenters, even calling on strangers she had heard might build at future dates, cajoling them into promises of buying from her and her only.

Soon she was a familiar sight on Atlanta’s streets, sitting in her buggy beside the dignified, disapproving old darky driver, a lap robe pulled high about her, her little mittened hands clasped in her lap.

Aunt Pitty had made her a pretty green mantelet which hid her figure and a green pancake hat which matched her eyes, and she always wore these becoming garments on her business calls.

A faint dab of rouge on her cheeks and a fainter fragrance of cologne made her a charming picture, as long as she did not alight from the buggy and show her figure.

And there was seldom any need for this, for she smiled and beckoned and the men came quickly to the buggy and frequently stood bareheaded in the rain to talk business with her.

She was not the only one who had seen the opportunities for making money out of lumber, but she did not fear her competitors.

She knew with conscious pride in her own smartness that she was the equal of any of them.

She was Gerald’s own daughter and the shrewd trading instinct she had inherited was now sharpened by her needs.

At first the other dealers had laughed at her, laughed with good-natured contempt at the very idea of a woman in business.

But now they did not laugh.

They swore silently as they saw her ride by.

The fact that she was a woman frequently worked in her favor, for she could upon occasion look so helpless and appealing that she melted hearts.

With no difficulty whatever she could mutely convey the impression of a brave but timid lady, forced by brutal circumstance into a distasteful position, a helpless little lady who would probably starve if customers didn’t buy her lumber.

But when ladylike airs failed to get results she was coldly businesslike and willingly undersold her competitors at a loss to herself if it would bring her a new customer.

She was not above selling a poor grade of lumber for the price of good lumber if she thought she would not be detected, and she had no scruples about blackguarding the other lumber dealers.

With every appearance of reluctance at disclosing the unpleasant truth, she would sigh and tell prospective customers that her competitors’ lumber was far too high in price, rotten, full of knot holes and in general of deplorably poor quality.

The first time Scarlett lied in this fashion she felt disconcerted and guilty—disconcerted because the lie sprang so easily and naturally to her lips, guilty because the thought flashed into her mind: What would Mother say?

There was no doubt what Ellen would say to a daughter who told lies and engaged in sharp practices.

She would be stunned and incredulous and would speak gentle words that stung despite their gentleness, would talk of honor and honesty and truth and duty to one’s neighbor.

Momentarily, Scarlett cringed as she pictured the look on her mother’s face.

And then the picture faded, blotted out by an impulse, hard, unscrupulous and greedy, which had been born in the lean days at Tara and was now strengthened by the present uncertainty of life.

So she passed this milestone as she had passed others before it—with a sigh that she was not as Ellen would like her to be, a shrug and the repetition of her unfailing charm: “I’ll think of all this later.”

But she never again thought of Ellen in connection with her business practices, never again regretted any means she used to take trade away from other lumber dealers.

She knew she was perfectly safe in lying about them.

Southern chivalry protected her.

A Southern lady could lie about a gentleman, but a Southern gentleman could not lie about a lady or, worse still, call the lady a liar.

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Other lumbermen could only fume inwardly and state heatedly, in the bosoms of their families, that they wished to God Mrs. Kennedy was a man for just about five minutes.

One poor white who operated a mill on the Decatur road did try to fight Scarlett with her own weapons, saying openly that she was a liar and a swindler.

But it hurt him rather than helped, for everyone was appalled that even a poor white should say such shocking things about a lady of good family, even when the lady was conducting herself in such an unwomanly way.

Scarlett bore his remarks with silent dignity and, as time went by, she turned all her attention to him and his customers.

She undersold him so relentlessly and delivered, with secret groans, such an excellent quality of lumber to prove her probity that he was soon bankrupt.

Then, to Frank’s horror, she triumphantly bought his mill at her own price.

Once in her possession there arose the perplexing problem of finding a trustworthy man to put in charge of it.

She did not want another man like Mr. Johnson.

She knew that despite all her watchfulness he was still selling her lumber behind her back, but she thought it would be easy to find the right sort of man.

Wasn’t everybody as poor as Job’s turkey, and weren’t the streets full of men, some of them formerly rich, who were without work?

The day never went by that Frank did not give money to some hungry ex-soldier or that Pitty and Cookie did not wrap up food for gaunt beggars.

But Scarlett, for some reason she could not understand, did not want any of these.

“I don’t want men who haven’t found something to do after a year,” she thought.

“If they haven’t adjusted to peace yet, they couldn’t adjust to me.

And they all look so hangdog and licked.

I don’t want a man who’s licked.

I want somebody who’s smart and energetic like Renny or Tommy Wellburn or Kells Whiting or one of the Simmons boys or—or any of that tribe.

They haven’t got that I-don’t-care-about-anything look the soldiers had right after the surrender.

They look like they cared a heap about a heap of things.”

But to her surprise the Simmons boys, who had started a brick kiln, and Kells Whiting, who was selling a preparation made up in his mother’s kitchen, that was guaranteed to straighten the kinkiest negro hair in six applications, smiled politely, thanked her and refused.

One of Mrs. Merriwether’s nephews observed impertinently that while he didn’t especially enjoy driving a dray, it was his own dray and he would rather get somewhere under his own steam than Scarlett’s.

One afternoon, Scarlett pulled up her buggy beside René Picard’s pie wagon and hailed René and the crippled Tommy Wellburn, who was catching a ride home with his friend.

“Look here, Renny, why don’t you come and work for me?

Managing a mill is a sight more respectable than driving a pie wagon.

I’d think you’d be ashamed.”

“Me, I am dead to shame,” grinned René.

“Who would be respectable?

All of my days I was respectable until ze war set me free lak ze darkies.

Nevaire again must I be deegneefied and full of ennui.

Free lak ze bird!

I lak my pie wagon.

I lak my mule.

I lak ze dear Yankees who so kindly buy ze pie of Madame Belle Mère.

No, my Scarlett, I must be ze King of ze Pies.

Eet ees my destiny!

Lak Napoleon, I follow my star.”

He flourished his whip dramatically.

“But you weren’t raised to sell pies any more than Tommy was raised to wrastle with a bunch of wild Irish masons.

My kind of work is more—”

“And I suppose you were raised to run a lumber mill,” said Tommy, the corners of his mouth twitching.

“Yes, I can just see little Scarlett at her mother’s knee, lisping her lesson, ‘Never sell good lumber if you can get a better price for bad.’”

René roared at this, his small monkey eyes dancing with glee as he whacked Tommy on his twisted back.

“Don’t be impudent,” said Scarlett coldly, for she saw little humor in Tommy’s remark.

“Of course, I wasn’t raised to run a sawmill.”

“I didn’t mean to be impudent.

But you are running a sawmill, whether you were raised to it or not.

And running it very well, too.

Well, none of us, as far as I can see, are doing what we intended to do right now, but I think we’ll make out just the same.

It’s a poor person and a poor nation that sits down and cries because life isn’t precisely what they expected it to be.

Why don’t you pick up some enterprising Carpetbagger to work for you, Scarlett?

The woods are full of them, God knows.”

“I don’t want a Carpetbagger.

Carpetbaggers will steal anything that isn’t red hot or nailed down.

If they amounted to anything they’d have stayed where they were, instead of coming down here to pick our bones.

I want a nice man, from nice folks, who is smart and honest and energetic and—”

“You don’t want much.

And you won’t get it for the wage you’re offering.

All the men of that description, barring the badly maimed ones, have already got something to do.

They may be round pegs in square holes but they’ve all got something to do.

Something of their own that they’d rather do than work for a woman.”

“Men haven’t got much sense, have they, when you get down to rock bottom?”

“Maybe not but they’ve got a heap of pride,” said Tommy soberly.

“Pride!

Pride tastes awfully good, especially when the crust is flaky and you put meringue on it,” said Scarlett tartly.

The two men laughed, a bit unwillingly, and it seemed to Scarlett that they drew together in united masculine disapproval of her.

What Tommy said was true, she thought, running over in her mind the men she had approached and the ones she intended to approach.

They were all busy, busy at something, working hard, working harder than they would have dreamed possible in the days before the war.

They weren’t doing what they wanted to do perhaps, or what was easiest to do, or what they had been reared to do, but they were doing something.

Times were too hard for men to be choosy.

And if they were sorrowing for lost hopes, longing for lost ways of living, no one knew it but them.

They were fighting a new war, a harder war than the one before.

And they were caring about life again, caring with the same urgency and the same violence that animated them before the war had cut their lives in two.

“Scarlett,” said Tommy awkwardly, “I do hate to ask a favor of you, after being impudent to you, but I’m going to ask it just the same.

Maybe it would help you anyway.

My brother-in-law, Hugh Elsing, isn’t doing any too well peddling kindling wood.

Everybody except the Yankees goes out and collects his own kindling wood.

And I know things are mighty hard with the whole Elsing family.

I—I do what I can, but you see I’ve got Fanny to support, and then, too, I’ve got my mother and two widowed sisters down in Sparta to look after.

Hugh is nice, and you wanted a nice man, and he’s from nice folks, as you know, and he’s honest.”

“But—well, Hugh hasn’t got much gumption or else he’d make a success of his kindling.”

Tommy shrugged.

“You’ve got a hard way of looking at things, Scarlett,” he said.

“But you think Hugh over.

You could go far and do worse.

I think his honesty and his willingness will outweigh his lack of gumption.”

Scarlett did not answer, for she did not want to be too rude.

But to her mind there were few, if any, qualities that outweighed gumption.

After she had unsuccessfully canvassed the town and refused the importuning of many eager Carpetbaggers, she finally decided to take Tommy’s suggestion and ask Hugh Elsing.

He had been a dashing and resourceful officer during the war, but two severe wounds and four years of fighting seemed to have drained him of all his resourcefulness, leaving him to face the rigors of peace as bewildered as a child.

There was a lost-dog look in his eyes these days as he went about peddling his firewood, and he was not at all the kind of man she had hoped to get.

“He’s stupid,” she thought.

“He doesn’t know a thing about business and I’ll bet he can’t add two and two.

And I doubt if he’ll ever learn.

But, at least, he’s honest and won’t swindle me.”

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Scarlett had little use these days for honesty in herself, but the less she valued it in herself the more she was beginning to value it in others.

“It’s a pity Johnnie Gallegher is tied up with Tommy Wellburn on that construction work,” she thought.

“He’s just the kind of man I want.

He’s hard as nails and slick as a snake, but he’d be honest if it paid him to be honest.

I understand him and he understands me and we could do business together very well.

Maybe I can get him when the hotel is finished, and till then I’ll have to make out on Hugh and Mr. Johnson.

If I put Hugh in charge of the new mill and leave Mr. Johnson at the old one, I can stay in town and see to the selling while they handle the milling and hauling.

Until I can get Johnnie I’ll have to risk Mr. Johnson robbing me if I stay in town all the time.

If only he wasn’t a thief!

I believe I’ll build a lumber yard on half that lot Charles left me.

If only Frank didn’t holler so loud about me building a saloon on the other half!

Well, I shall build the saloon just as soon as I get enough money ahead, no matter how he takes on.

If only Frank wasn’t so thin skinned.

Oh, God, if only I wasn’t going to have a baby at this of all times!

In a little while I’ll be so big I can’t go out.

Oh, God, if only I wasn’t going to have a baby!

And oh, God, if the damned Yankees will only let me alone!

If—”

If!

If!

If!

There were so many ifs in life, never any certainty of anything, never any sense of security, always the dread of losing everything and being cold and hungry again.

Of course, Frank was making a little more money now, but Frank was always ailing with colds and frequently forced to stay in bed for days.

Suppose he should become an invalid.

No, she could not afford to count on Frank for much.

She must not count on anything or anybody but herself.

And what she could earn seemed so pitiably small.

Oh, what would she do if the Yankees came and took it all away from her?

If!

If!

If!

Half of what she made every month went to Will at Tara, part to Rhett to repay his loan and the rest she hoarded.

No miser ever counted his gold oftener than she and no miser ever had greater fear of losing it.

She would not put the money in the bank, for it might fail or the Yankees might confiscate it.

So she carried what she could with her, tucked into her corset, and hid small wads of bills about the house, under loose bricks on the hearth, in her scrap bag, between the pages of the Bible.

And her temper grew shorter and shorter as the weeks went by, for every dollar she saved would be just one more dollar to lose if disaster descended.

Frank, Pitty and the servants bore her outbursts with maddening kindness, attributing her bad disposition to her pregnancy, never realizing the true cause.

Frank knew that pregnant women must be humored, so he put his pride in his pocket and said nothing more about her running the mills and her going about town at such a time, as no lady should do.

Her conduct was a constant embarrassment to him but he reckoned he could endure it for a while longer.

After the baby came, he knew she would be the same sweet, feminine girl he had courted.

But in spite of everything he did to appease her, she continued to have her tantrums and often he thought she acted like one possessed.

No one seemed to realize what really possessed her, what drove her like a mad woman.

It was a passion to get her affairs in order before she had to retire behind doors, to have as much money as possible in case the deluge broke upon her again, to have a stout levee of cash against the rising tide of Yankee hate.

Money was the obsession dominating her mind these days.

When she thought of the baby at all, it was with baffled rage at the untimeliness of it.

“Death and taxes and childbirth!

There’s never any convenient time for any of them!”

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Atlanta had been scandalized enough when Scarlett, a woman, began operating the sawmill but, as time went by, the town decided there was no limit to what she would do.

Her sharp trading was shocking, especially when her poor mother had been a Robillard, and it was positively indecent the way she kept on going about the streets when everyone knew she was pregnant.

No respectable white woman and few negroes ever went outside their homes from the moment they first suspected they were with child, and Mrs. Merriwether declared indignantly that from the way Scarlett was acting she was likely to have the baby on the public streets.

But all the previous criticism of her conduct was as nothing compared with the buzz of gossip that now went through the town.

Scarlett was not only trafficking with the Yankees but was giving every appearance of really liking it!

Mrs. Merriwether and many other Southerners were also doing business with the newcomers from the North, but the difference was that they did not like it and plainly showed they did not like it.

And Scarlett did, or seemed to, which was just as bad.

She had actually taken tea with the Yankee officers’ wives in their homes!

In fact, she had done practically everything short of inviting them into her own home, and the town guessed she would do even that, except for Aunt Pitty and Frank.

Scarlett knew the town was talking but she did not care, could not afford to care.

She still hated the Yankees with as fierce a hate as on the day when they tried to burn Tara, but she could dissemble that hate.

She knew that if she was going to make money, she would have to make it out of the Yankees, and she had learned that buttering them up with smiles and kind words was the surest way to get their business for her mill.

Some day when she was very rich and her money was hidden away where the Yankees could not find it, then, then she would tell them exactly what she thought of them, tell them how she hated and loathed and despised them.

And what a joy that would be!

But until that time came, it was just plain common sense to get along with them.

And if that was hypocrisy, let Atlanta make the most of it.

She discovered that making friends with the Yankee officers was as easy as shooting birds on the ground.

They were lonely exiles in a hostile land and many of them were starved for polite feminine associations in a town where respectable women drew their skirts aside in passing and looked as if they would like to spit on them.

Only the prostitutes and the negro women had kind words for them.

But Scarlett was obviously a lady and a lady of family, for all that she worked, and they thrilled to her flashing smile and the pleasant light in her green eyes.

Frequently when Scarlett sat in her buggy talking to them and making her dimples play, her dislike for them rose so strong that it was hard not to curse them to their faces.

But she restrained herself and she found that twisting Yankee men around her finger was no more difficult than that same diversion had been with Southern men.

Only this was no diversion but a grim business.

The rôle she enacted was that of a refined sweet Southern lady in distress.

With an air of dignified reserve she was able to keep her victims at their proper distance, but there was nevertheless a graciousness in her manner which left a certain warmth in the Yankee officers’ memories of Mrs. Kennedy.

This warmth was very profitable—as Scarlett had intended it to be.

Many of the officers of the garrison, not knowing how long they would be stationed in Atlanta, had sent for their wives and families.

As the hotels and boarding houses were overflowing, they were building small houses; and they were glad to buy their lumber from the gracious Mrs. Kennedy, who treated them more politely than anyone else in town.

The Carpetbaggers and Scallawags also, who were building fine homes and stores and hotels with their new wealth, found it more pleasant to do business with her than with the former Confederate soldiers who were courteous but with a courtesy more formal and cold than outspoken hate.

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So, because she was pretty and charming and could appear quite helpless and forlorn at times, they gladly patronized her lumber yard and also Frank’s store, feeling that they should help a plucky little woman who apparently had only a shiftless husband to support her.

And Scarlett, watching the business grow, felt that she was safeguarding not only the present with Yankee money but the future with Yankee friends.

Keeping her relations with the Yankee officers on the plane she desired was easier than she expected, for they all seemed to be in awe of Southern ladies, but Scarlett soon found that their wives presented a problem she had not anticipated.

Contacts with the Yankee women were not of her seeking.

She would have been glad to avoid them but she could not, for the officers’ wives were determined to meet her.

They had an avid curiosity about the South and Southern women, and Scarlett gave them their first opportunity to satisfy it.

Other Atlanta women would have nothing to do with them and even refused to bow to them in church, so when business brought Scarlett to their homes, she was like an answer to a prayer.

Often when Scarlett sat in her buggy in front of a Yankee home talking of uprights and shingles with the man of the house, the wife came out to join in the conversation or insist that she come inside for a cup of tea.

Scarlett seldom refused, no matter how distasteful the idea might be, for she always hoped to have an opportunity to suggest tactfully that they do their trading at Frank’s store.

But her self-control was severely tested many times, because of the personal questions they asked and because of the smug and condescending attitude they displayed toward all things Southern.

Accepting Uncle Tom’s Cabin as revelation second only to the Bible, the Yankee women all wanted to know about the bloodhounds which every Southerner kept to track down runaway slaves.

And they never believed her when she told them she had only seen one bloodhound in all her life and it was a small mild dog and not a huge ferocious mastiff.

They wanted to know about the dreadful branding irons which planters used to mark the faces of their slaves and the cat-o’-nine-tails with which they beat them to death, and they evidenced what Scarlett felt was a very nasty and ill-bred interest in slave concubinage.

Especially did she resent this in view of the enormous increase in mulatto babies in Atlanta since the Yankee soldiers had settled in the town.

Any other Atlanta woman would have expired in rage at having to listen to such bigoted ignorance but Scarlett managed to control herself.

Assisting her in this was the fact that they aroused her contempt more than her anger.

After all, they were Yankees and no one expected anything better from Yankees.

So their unthinking insults to her state, her people and their morals, glanced off and never struck deep enough to cause her more than a well-concealed sneer until an incident occurred which made her sick with rage and showed her, if she needed any showing, how wide was the gap between North and South and how utterly impossible it was to bridge it.

While driving home with Uncle Peter one afternoon, she passed the house into which were crowded the families of three officers who were building their own homes with Scarlett’s lumber.

The three wives were standing in the walk as she drove by and they waved to her to stop.

Coming out to the carriage block they greeted her in accents that always made her feel that one could forgive Yankees almost anything except their voices.

“You are just the person I want to see, Mrs. Kennedy,” said a tall thin woman from Maine.

“I want to get some information about this benighted town.”

Scarlett swallowed the insult to Atlanta with the contempt it deserved and smiled her best.

“And what can I tell you?

“My nurse, my Bridget, has gone back North.

She said she wouldn’t stay another day down here among the ‘naygurs’ as she calls them.

And the children are just driving me distracted!

Do tell me how to go about getting another nurse.

I do not know where to apply.”

“That shouldn’t be difficult,” said Scarlett and laughed.

“If you can find a darky just in from the country who hasn’t been spoiled by the Freedmen’s Bureau, you’ll have the best kind of servant possible.

Just stand at your gate here and ask every darky woman who passes and I’m sure—”

The three women broke into indignant outcries.

“Do you think I’d trust my babies to a black nigger?” cried the Maine woman.

“I want a good Irish girl.”

“I’m afraid you’ll find no Irish servants in Atlanta,” answered Scarlett, coolness in her voice.

“Personally, I’ve never seen a white servant and I shouldn’t care to have one in my house.

And,” she could not keep a slight note of sarcasm from her words, “I assure you that darkies aren’t cannibals and are quite trustworthy.”

“Goodness, no!

I wouldn’t have one in my house.

The idea!”

“I wouldn’t trust them any farther than I could see them and as for letting them handle my babies…. ”

Scarlett thought of the kind, gnarled hands of Mammy worn rough in Ellen’s service and hers and Wade’s.

What did these strangers know of black hands, how dear and comforting they could be, how unerringly they knew how to soothe, to pat, to fondle?

She laughed shortly.

“It’s strange you should feel that way when it was you all who freed them.”

“Lor’!

Not I, dearie,” laughed the Maine woman.

“I never saw a nigger till I came South last month and I don’t care if I never see another.

They give me the creeps.

I wouldn’t trust one of them…. ”

For some moments Scarlett had been conscious that Uncle Peter was breathing hard and sitting up very straight as he stared steadily at the horse’s ears.

Her attention was called to him more forcibly when the Maine woman broke off suddenly with a laugh and pointed him out to her companions.

“Look at that old nigger swell up like a toad,” she giggled.

“I’ll bet he’s an old pet of yours, isn’t he?

You Southerners don’t know how to treat niggers.

You spoil them to death.”

Peter sucked in his breath and his wrinkled brow showed deep furrows but he kept his eyes straight ahead.

He had never had the term “nigger” applied to him by a white person in all his life.

By other negroes, yes.

But never by a white person.

And to be called untrustworthy and an “old pet,” he, Peter, who had been the dignified mainstay of the Hamilton family for years!

Scarlett felt, rather than saw, the black chin begin to shake with hurt pride, and a killing rage swept over her.

She had listened with calm contempt while these women had underrated the Confederate Army, blackguarded Jeff Davis and accused Southerners of murder and torture of their slaves.

If it were to her advantage she would have endured insults about her own virtue and honesty.

But the knowledge that they had hurt the faithful old darky with their stupid remarks fired her like a match in gunpowder.

For a moment she looked at the big horse pistol in Peter’s belt and her hands itched for the feel of it.

They deserved killing, these insolent, ignorant, arrogant conquerors.

But she bit down on her teeth until her jaw muscles stood out, reminding herself that the time had not yet come when she could tell the Yankees just what she thought of them.

Some day, yes.

My God, yes!

But not yet.

“Uncle Peter is one of our family,” she said, her voice shaking.

“Good afternoon.

Drive on, Peter.”

Peter laid the whip on the horse so suddenly that the startled animal jumped forward and as the buggy jounced off, Scarlett heard the Maine woman say with puzzled accents: “Her family?

You don’t suppose she meant a relative?

He’s exceedingly black.”

God damn them!

They ought to be wiped off the face of the earth.

If ever I get money enough, I’ll spit in all their faces!

I’ll—

She glanced at Peter and saw that a tear was trickling down his nose.

Instantly a passion of tenderness, of grief for his humiliation swamped her, made her eyes sting.

It was as though someone had been senselessly brutal to a child.

Those women had hurt Uncle Peter—Peter who had been through the Mexican War with old Colonel Hamilton, Peter who had held his master in his arms when he died, who had raised Melly and Charles and looked after the feckless, foolish Pittypat, “pertecked” her when she refugeed, and “’quired” a horse to bring her back from Macon through a war-torn country after the surrender.

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And they said they wouldn’t trust niggers!

“Peter,” she said, her voice breaking as she put her hand on his thin arm.

“I’m ashamed of you for crying.

What do you care?

They aren’t anything but damned Yankees!”

“Dey talked in front of me lak Ah wuz a mule an’ couldn’ unnerstan’ dem—lak Ah wuz a Affikun an’ din’ know whut dey wuz talkin’ ’bout,” said Peter, giving a tremendous sniff.

“An’ dey call me a nigger an’ Am ain’ never been call a nigger by no w’ite folks, an’ dey call me a ole pet an’ say dat niggers ain’ ter be trus’ed!

Me not ter be trus’ed!

Why, w’en de ole Cunnel wuz dyin’ he say ter me, ‘You, Peter!

You look after mah chillun.

Tek keer of yo’ young Miss Pittypat,’ he say, ‘ ’cause she ain’ got no mo’ sense dan a hoppergrass.’ An’ Ah done tek keer of her good all dese y’ars—”

“Nobody but the Angel Gabriel could have done better,” said Scarlett soothingly.

“We just couldn’t have lived without you.”

“Yas’m, thankee kinely, Ma’m. Ah knows it an’ you knows it, but dem Yankee folks doan know it an’ dey doan want ter know it.

Huccome dey come mixin’ in our bizness, Miss Scarlett?

Dey doan unnerstan’ us Confedruts.”

Scarlett said nothing for she was still burning with the wrath she had not exploded in the Yankee women’s faces.

The two drove home in silence.

Peter’s sniffles stopped and his underlip began to protrude gradually until it stuck out alarmingly.

His indignation was mounting, now that the initial hurt was subsiding.

Scarlett thought: What damnably queer people Yankees are!

Those women seemed to think that because Uncle Peter was black, he had no ears to hear with and no feelings, as tender as their own, to be hurt.

They did not know that negroes had to be handled gently, as though they were children, directed, praised, petted, scolded.

They didn’t understand negroes or the relations between the negroes and their former masters.

Yet they had fought a war to free them.

And having freed them, they didn’t want to have anything to do with them, except to use them to terrorize Southerners.

They didn’t like them, didn’t trust them, didn’t understand them, and yet their constant cry was that Southerners didn’t know how to get along with them.

Not trust a darky!

Scarlett trusted them far more than most white people, certainly more than she trusted any Yankee.

There were qualities of loyalty and tirelessness and love in them that no strain could break, no money could buy.

She thought of the faithful few who remained at Tara in the face of the Yankee invasion when they could have fled or joined the troops for lives of leisure.

But they had stayed.

She thought of Dilcey toiling in the cotton fields beside her, of Pork risking his life in neighboring hen houses that the family might eat, of Mammy coming to Atlanta with her to keep her from doing wrong.

She thought of the servants of her neighbors who had stood loyally beside their white owners, protecting their mistresses while the men were at the front, refugeeing with them through the terrors of the war, nursing the wounded, burying the dead, comforting the bereaved, working, begging, stealing to keep food on the tables.

And even now, with the Freedmen’s Bureau promising all manner of wonders, they still stuck with their white folks and worked much harder than they ever worked in slave times.

But the Yankees didn’t understand these things and would never understand them.

“Yet they set you free,” she said aloud.

“No, Ma’m!

Dey din’ sot me free.

Ah wouldn’t let no sech trash sot me free,” said Peter indignantly.

“Ah still b’longs ter Miss Pitty an’ w’en Ah dies she gwine lay me in de Hamilton buhyin’ groun’ whar Ah b’longs….

Mah Miss gwine ter be in a state w’en Ah tells her ’bout how you let dem Yankee women ’sult me.”

“I did no such thing!” cried Scarlett, startled.

“You did so, Miss Scarlett,” said Peter, pushing out his lip even farther.

“De pint is, needer you nor me had no bizness bein’ wid Yankees, so dey could ’sult me.

Ef you hadn’t talked wid dem, dey wouldn’ had no chance ter treat me lak a mule or a Affikun. An’ you din’ tek up fer me, needer.”

“I did, too!” said Scarlett, stung by the criticism.

“Didn’t I tell them you were one of the family?”

“Dat ain’ tekkin’ up. Dat’s jes’ a fac,” said Peter. “Miss Scarlett, you ain’ got no bizness havin’ no truck wid Yankees. Ain’ no other ladies doin’ it.

You wouldn’ ketch Miss Pitty wipin’ her lil shoes on sech trash.

An’ she ain’ gwine lak it w’en she hear ’bout whut dey said ’bout me.”

Peter’s criticism hurt worse than anything Frank or Aunt Pitty or the neighbors had said and it so annoyed her she longed to shake the old darky until his toothless gums clapped together.

What Peter said was true but she hated to hear it from a negro and a family negro, too.

Not to stand high in the opinion of one’s servants was as humiliating a thing as could happen to a Southerner.

“A ole pet!” Peter grumbled.

“Ah specs Miss Pitty ain’ gwine want me ter drive you roun’ no mo’ affer dat.

No, Ma’m!”

“Aunt Pitty will want you to drive me as usual,” she said sternly, “so let’s hear no more about it.”

“Ah’ll git a mizry in mah back,” warned Peter darkly.

“Mah back huttin’ me so bad dis minute Ah kain sceercely set up.

Mah Miss ain’ gwine want me ter do no drivin’ w’en Ah got a mizry….

Miss Scarlett, it ain’ gwine do you no good ter stan’ high wid de Yankees an’ de w’ite trash, ef yo’ own folks doan ’prove of you.”

That was as accurate a summing up of the situation as could be made and Scarlett relapsed into infuriated silence.

Yes, the conquerors did approve of her and her family and her neighbors did not.

She knew all the things the town was saying about her.

And now even Peter disapproved of her to the point of not caring to be seen in public with her.

That was the last straw.

Heretofore she had been careless of public opinion, careless and a little contemptuous.

But Peter’s words caused fierce resentment to burn in her breast, drove her to a defensive position, made her suddenly dislike her neighbors as much as she disliked the Yankees.

“Why should they care what I do?” she thought.

“They must think I enjoy associating with Yankees and working like a field hand.

They’re just making a hard job harder for me.

But I don’t care what they think.

I won’t let myself care.

I can’t afford to care now.

But some day—some day—”

Oh, some day!

When there was security in her world again, then she would sit back and fold her hands and be a great lady as Ellen had been.

She would be helpless and sheltered, as a lady should be, and then everyone would approve of her.

Oh, how grand she would be when she had money again!

Then she could permit herself to be kind and gentle, as Ellen had been, and thoughtful of other people and of the proprieties, too.

She would not be driven by fears, day and night, and life would be a placid, unhurried affair.

She would have time to play with her children and listen to their lessons.

There would be long warm afternoons when ladies would call and, amid the rustlings of taffeta petticoats and the rhythmic harsh cracklings of palmetto fans, she would serve tea and delicious sandwiches and cakes and leisurely gossip the hours away.

And she would be so kind to those who were suffering misfortune, take baskets to the poor and soup and jelly to the sick and “air” those less fortunate in her fine carriage.

She would be a lady in the true Southern manner, as her mother had been.

And then, everyone would love her as they had loved Ellen and they would say how unselfish she was and call her “Lady Bountiful.”

Her pleasure in these thoughts of the future was undimmed by any realization that she had no real desire to be unselfish or charitable or kind.

All she wanted was the reputation for possessing these qualities.

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But the meshes of her brain were too wide, too coarse, to filter such small differences.

It was enough that some day, when she had money, everyone would approve of her.

Some day!

But not now.

Not now, in spite of what anyone might say of her.

Now, there was no time to be a great lady.

Peter was as good as his word.

Aunt Pitty did get into a state, and Peter’s misery developed overnight to such proportions that he never drove the buggy again.

Thereafter Scarlett drove alone and the calluses which had begun to leave her palms came back again.

********

So the spring months went by, the cool rains of April passing into the warm balm of green May weather.

The weeks were packed with work and worry and the handicaps of increasing pregnancy, with old friends growing cooler and her family increasingly more kind, more maddeningly solicitous and more completely blind to what was driving her.

During those days of anxiety and struggle there was only one dependable, understanding person in her world, and that person was Rhett Butler.

It was odd that he of all people should appear in this light, for he was as unstable as quicksilver and as perverse as a demon fresh from the pit.

But he gave her sympathy, something she had never had from anyone and never expected from him.

Frequently he was out of town on those mysterious trips to New Orleans which he never explained but which she felt sure, in a faintly jealous way, were connected with a woman—or women.

But after Uncle Peter’s refusal to drive her, he remained in Atlanta for longer and longer intervals.

While in town, he spent most of his time gambling in the rooms above the Girl of the Period Saloon, or in Belle Watling’s bar hobnobbing with the wealthier of the Yankees and Carpetbaggers in money-making schemes which made the townspeople detest him even more than his cronies.

He did not call at the house now, probably in deference to the feelings of Frank and Pitty who would have been outraged at a male caller while Scarlett was in a delicate condition.

But she met him by accident almost every day.

Time and again, he came riding up to her buggy when she was passing through lonely stretches of Peachtree road and Decatur road where the mills lay.

He always drew rein and talked and sometimes he tied his horse to the back of the buggy and drove her on her rounds.

She tired more easily these days than she liked to admit and she was always silently grateful when he took the reins.

He always left her before they reached the town again but all Atlanta knew about their meetings, and it gave the gossips something new to add to the long list of Scarlett’s affronts to the proprieties.

She wondered occasionally if these meetings were not more than accidental.

They became more and more numerous as the weeks went by and as the tension in town heightened over negro outrages.

But why did he seek her out, now of all times when she looked her worst?

Certainly he had no designs upon her if he had ever had any, and she was beginning to doubt even this.

It had been months since he made any joking references to their distressing scene at the Yankee jail.

He never mentioned Ashley and her love for him or made any coarse and ill-bred remarks about “coveting her.”

She thought it best to let sleeping dogs lie, so she did not ask for an explanation of their frequent meetings.

And finally she decided that, because he had little to do besides gamble and had few enough nice friends in Atlanta, he sought her out solely for companionship’s sake.

Whatever his reason might be, she found his company most welcome.

He listened to her moans about lost customers and bad debts, the swindling ways of Mr. Johnson and the incompetency of Hugh.

He applauded her triumphs, where Frank merely smiled indulgently and Pitty said “Dear me!” in a dazed manner.

She was sure that he frequently threw business her way, for he knew all the rich Yankees and Carpetbaggers intimately, but he always denied being helpful.

She knew him for what he was and she never trusted him, but her spirits always rose with pleasure at the sight of him riding around the curve of a shady road on his big black horse.

When he climbed into the buggy and took the reins from her and threw her some impertinent remark, she felt young and gay and attractive again, for all her worries and her increasing bulk.

She could talk to him about almost everything, with no care for concealing her motives or her real opinions and she never ran out of things to say as she did with Frank—or even with Ashley, if she must be honest with herself.

But of course, in all her conversations with Ashley there were so many things which could not be said, for honor’s sake, that the sheer force of them inhibited other remarks.

It was comforting to have a friend like Rhett, now that for some unaccountable reason he had decided to be on good behavior with her.

Very comforting, for she had so few friends these days.

“Rhett,” she asked stormily, shortly after Uncle Peter’s ultimatum, “why do folks in this town treat me so scurvily and talk about me so?

It’s a toss-up who they talk worst about, me or the Carpetbaggers!

I’ve minded my own business and haven’t done anything wrong and—”

“If you haven’t done anything wrong, it’s because you haven’t had the opportunity, and perhaps they dimly realize it.”

“Oh, do be serious!

They make me so mad.

All I’ve done is try to make a little money and—”

“All you’ve done is to be different from other women and you’ve made a little success at it.

As I’ve told you before, that is the one unforgivable sin in any society.

Be different and be damned!

Scarlett, the mere fact that you’ve made a success of your mill is an insult to every man who hasn’t succeeded.

Remember, a well-bred female’s place is in the home and she should know nothing about this busy, brutal world.”

“But if I had stayed in my home, I wouldn’t have had any home left to stay in.”

“The inference is that you should have starved genteelly and with pride.”

“Oh, fiddle-dee-dee!

But look at Mrs. Merriwether.

She’s selling pies to Yankees and that’s worse than running a sawmill, and Mrs. Elsing takes in sewing and keeps boarders, and Fanny paints awful-looking china things that nobody wants and everybody buys to help her and—”

“But you miss the point, my pet.

They aren’t successful and so they aren’t affronting the hot Southern pride of their men folks.

The men can still say, ‘Poor sweet sillies, how hard they try!

Well, I’ll let them think they’re helping.’ And besides, the ladies you mentioned don’t enjoy having to work.

They let it be known that they are only doing it until some man comes along to relieve them of their unwomanly burden.

And so everybody feels sorry for them.

But obviously you do like to work and obviously you aren’t going to let any man tend to your business for you, and so no one can feel sorry for you.

And Atlanta is never going to forgive you for that.

It’s so pleasant to feel sorry for people.”

“I wish you’d be serious, sometimes.”

“Did you ever hear the Oriental proverb: ‘The dogs bark but the caravan passes on’?

Let them bark, Scarlett.

I fear nothing will stop your caravan.”

“But why should they mind my making a little money?”

“You can’t have everything, Scarlett.

You can either make money in your present unladylike manner and meet cold shoulders everywhere you go, or you can be poor and genteel and have lots of friends.

You’ve made your choice.”

“I won’t be poor,” she said swiftly.

“But—it is the right choice, isn’t it?”

“If it’s money you want most.”

“Yes, I want money more than anything else in the world.”

“Then you’ve made the only choice.

But there’s a penalty attached, as there is to most things you want.

It’s loneliness.”

That silenced her for a moment.

It was true.

When she stopped to think about it, she was a little lonely—lonely for feminine companionship.

During the war years she had had Ellen to visit when she felt blue.

And since Ellen’s death, there had always been Melanie, though she and Melanie had nothing in common except the hard work at Tara.

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Now there was no one, for Aunt Pitty had no conception of life beyond her small round of gossip.

“I think—I think,” she began hesitantly, “that I’ve always been lonely where women were concerned.

It isn’t just my working that makes Atlanta ladies dislike me.

They just don’t like me anyway.

No woman ever really liked me, except Mother.

Even my sisters.

I don’t know why, but even before the war, even before I married Charlie, ladies didn’t seem to approve of anything I did—”

“You forget Mrs. Wilkes,” said Rhett and his eyes gleamed maliciously.

“She has always approved of you up to the hilt.

I daresay she’d approve of anything you did, short of murder.”

Scarlett thought grimly: “She’s even approved of murder,” and she laughed contemptuously.

“Oh, Melly!” she said, and then, ruefully: “It’s certainly not to my credit that Melly is the only woman who approves of me, for she hasn’t the sense of a guinea hen.

If she had any sense—” She stopped in some confusion.

“If she had any sense, she’d realize a few things and she couldn’t approve,” Rhett finished.

“Well, you know more about that than I do, of course.”

“Oh, damn your memory and your bad manners!”

“I’ll pass over your unjustified rudeness with the silence it deserves and return to our former subject.

Make up your mind to this.

If you are different, you are isolated, not only from people of your own age but from those of your parents’ generation and from your children’s generation too.

They’ll never understand you and they’ll be shocked no matter what you do.

But your grandparents would probably be proud of you and say: ‘There’s a chip off the old block,’ and your grandchildren will sigh enviously and say: ‘What an old rip Grandma must have been!’ and they’ll try to be like you.”

Scarlett laughed with amusement.

“Sometimes you do hit on the truth!

Now there was my Grandma Robillard.

Mammy used to hold her over my head whenever I was naughty.

Grandma was as cold as an icicle and strict about her manners and everybody else’s manners, but she married three times and had any number of duels fought over her and she wore rouge and the most shockingly low-cut dresses and no—well, er—not much under her dresses.”

“And you admired her tremendously, for all that you tried to be like your mother! I had a grandfather on the Butler side who was a pirate.”

“Not really!

A walk-the-plank kind?”

“I daresay he made people walk the plank if there was any money to be made that way.

At any rate, he made enough money to leave my father quite wealthy.

But the family always referred to him carefully as a ‘sea captain.’

He was killed in a saloon brawl long before I was born.

His death was, needless to say, a great relief to his children, for the old gentleman was drunk most of the time and when in his cups was apt to forget that he was a retired sea captain and give reminiscences that curled his children’s hair.

However, I admired him and tried to copy him far more than I ever did my father, for Father is an amiable gentleman full of honorable habits and pious saws—so you see how it goes.

I’m sure your children won’t approve of you, Scarlett, any more than Mrs. Merriwether and Mrs. Elsing and their broods approve of you now.

Your children will probably be soft, prissy creatures, as the children of hard-bitten characters usually are.

And to make them worse, you, like every other mother, are probably determined that they shall never know the hardships you’ve known.

And that’s all wrong.

Hardships make or break people.

So you’ll have to wait for approval from your grandchildren.”

“I wonder what our grandchildren will be like!”

“Are you suggesting by that ‘our’ that you and I will have mutual grandchildren?

Fie, Mrs. Kennedy!”

Scarlett, suddenly conscious of her error of speech, went red.

It was more than his joking words that shamed her, for she was suddenly aware again of her thickening body.

In no way had either of them ever hinted at her condition and she had always kept the lap robe high under her armpits when with him, even on warm days, comforting herself in the usual feminine manner with the belief that she did not show at all when thus covered, and she was suddenly sick with quick rage at her own condition and shame that he should know.

“You get out of this buggy, you dirty-minded varmint,” she said, her voice shaking.

“I’ll do nothing of the kind,” he returned calmly.

“It’ll be dark before you get home and there’s a new colony of darkies living in tents and shanties near the next spring, mean niggers I’ve been told, and I see no reason why you should give the impulsive Ku Klux a cause for putting on their nightshirts and riding abroad this evening.”

“Get out!” she cried, tugging at the reins and suddenly nausea overwhelmed her.

He stopped the horse quickly, passed her two clean handkerchiefs and held her head over the side of the buggy with some skill.

The afternoon sun, slanting low through the newly leaved trees, spun sickeningly for a few moments in a swirl of gold and green.

When the spell had passed, she put her head in her hands and cried from sheer mortification.

Not only had she vomited before a man—in itself as horrible a contretemps as could overtake a woman—but by doing so, the humiliating fact of her pregnancy must now be evident.

She felt that she could never look him in the face again.

To have this happen with him, of all people, with Rhett who had no respect for women!

She cried, expecting some coarse and jocular remark from him which she would never be able to forget.

“Don’t be a fool,” he said quietly.

“And you are a fool, if you are crying for shame.

Come, Scarlett, don’t be a child.

Surely you must know that, not being blind, I knew you were pregnant.”

She said “Oh” in a stunned voice and tightened her fingers over her crimson face.

The word itself horrified her.

Frank always referred to her pregnancy embarrassedly as “your condition,” Gerald had been wont to say delicately “in the family way,” when he had to mention such matters, and ladies genteelly referred to pregnancy as being “in a fix.”

“You are a child if you thought I didn’t know, for all your smothering yourself under that hot lap robe.

Of course, I knew.

Why else do you think I’ve been—”

He stopped suddenly and a silence fell between them.

He picked up the reins and clucked to the horse.

He went on talking quietly and as his drawl fell pleasantly on her ears, some of the color faded from her down-tucked face.

“I didn’t think you could be so shocked, Scarlett. I thought you were a sensible person and I’m disappointed.

Can it be possible that modesty still lingers in your breast?

I’m afraid I’m not a gentleman to have mentioned the matter.

And I know I’m not a gentleman, in view of the fact that pregnant women do not embarrass me as they should.

I find it possible to treat them as normal creatures and not look at the ground or the sky or anywhere else in the universe except their waist lines—and then cast at them those furtive glances I’ve always thought the height of indecency.

Why should I?

It’s a perfectly normal state.

The Europeans are far more sensible than we are.

They compliment expectant mothers upon their expectations.

While I wouldn’t advise going that far, still it’s more sensible than our way of trying to ignore it.

It’s a normal state and women should be proud of it, instead of hiding behind closed doors as if they’d committed a crime.”

“Proud!” she cried in a strangled voice.

“Proud—ugh!”

“Aren’t you proud to be having a child?”

“Oh, dear God, no!

I—I hate babies!”

“You mean—Frank’s baby?”

“No—anybody’s baby.”

For a moment she went sick again at this new error of speech, but his voice went on as easily as though he had not marked it.

“Then we’re different.

I like babies.”

“You like them?” she cried, looking up, so startled at the statement that she forgot her embarrassment.

“What a liar you are!”

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“I like babies and I like little children, till they begin to grow up and acquire adult habits of thought and adult abilities to lie and cheat and be dirty.

That can’t be news to you.

You know I like Wade Hampton a lot, for all that he isn’t the boy he ought to be.”

That was true, thought Scarlett, suddenly marveling.

He did seem to enjoy playing with Wade and often brought him presents.

“Now that we’ve brought this dreadful subject into the light and you admit that you expect a baby some time in the not too distant future, I’ll say something I’ve been wanting to say for weeks—two things.

The first is that it’s dangerous for you to drive alone.

You know it.

You’ve been told it often enough.

If you don’t care personally whether or not you are raped, you might consider the consequences.

Because of your obstinacy, you may get yourself into a situation where your gallant fellow townsmen will be forced to avenge you by stringing up a few darkies.

And that will bring the Yankees down on them and someone will probably get hanged.

Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps one of the reasons the ladies do not like you is that your conduct may cause the neck-stretching of their sons and husbands?

And furthermore, if the Ku Klux handles many more negroes, the Yankees are going to tighten up on Atlanta in a way that will make Sherman’s conduct look angelic.

I know what I’m talking about, for I’m hand in glove with the Yankees.

Shameful to state, they treat me as one of them and I hear them talk openly.

They mean to stamp out the Ku Klux if it means burning the whole town again and hanging every male over ten.

That would hurt you, Scarlett.

You might lose money.

And there’s no telling where a prairie fire will stop, once it gets started.

Confiscation of property, higher taxes, fines for suspected women—I’ve heard them all suggested.

The Ku Klux—”

“Do you know any Ku Klux?

Is Tommy Wellburn or Hugh or—”

He shrugged impatiently.

“How should I know?

I’m a renegade, a turncoat, a Scallawag.

Would I be likely to know?

But I do know men who are suspected by the Yankees and one false move from them and they are as good as hanged.

While I know you would have no regrets at getting your neighbors on the gallows, I do believe you’d regret losing your mills.

I see by the stubborn look on your face that you do not believe me and my words are falling on stony ground.

So all I can say is, keep that pistol of yours handy—and when I’m in town, I’ll try to be on hand to drive you.”

“Rhett, do you really—is it to protect me that you—”

“Yes, my dear, it is my much advertised chivalry that makes me protect you.”

The mocking light began to dance in his black eyes and all signs of earnestness fled from his face.

“And why?

Because of my deep love for you, Mrs. Kennedy.

Yes, I have silently hungered and thirsted for you and worshiped you from afar; but being an honorable man, like Mr. Ashley Wilkes, I have concealed it from you.

You are, alas, Frank’s wife and honor has forbidden my telling this to you.

But even as Mr. Wilkes’ honor cracks occasionally, so mine is cracking now and I reveal my secret passion and my—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, hush!” interrupted Scarlett, annoyed as usual when he made her look like a conceited fool, and not caring to have Ashley and his honor become the subject of further conversation.

“What was the other thing you wanted to tell me?”

“What!

You change the subject when I am baring a loving but lacerated heart?

Well, the other thing is this.”

The mocking light died out of his eyes again and his face was dark and quiet.

“I want you to do something about this horse.

He’s stubborn and he’s got a mouth as tough as iron.

Tires you to drive him, doesn’t it?

Well, if he chose to bolt, you couldn’t possibly stop him.

And if you turned over in a ditch, it might kill your baby and you too.

You ought to get the heaviest curb bit you can, or else let me swap him for a gentle horse with a more sensitive mouth.”

She looked up into his blank, smooth face and suddenly her irritation fell away, even as her embarrassment had disappeared after the conversation about her pregnancy.

He had been kind, a few moments before, to put her at her ease when she was wishing that she were dead.

And he was being kinder now and very thoughtful about the horse.

She felt a rush of gratitude to him and she wondered why he could not always be this way.

“The horse is hard to drive,” she agreed meekly.

“Sometimes my arms ache all night from tugging at him.

You do what you think best about him, Rhett.”

His eyes chuckled wickedly.

“That sounds very sweet and feminine, Mrs. Kennedy.

Not in your usual masterful vein at all.

Well, it only takes proper handling to make a clinging vine out of you.”

She scowled and her temper came back.

“You will get out of this buggy this time, or I will hit you with the whip.

I don’t know why I put up with you—why I try to be nice to you.

You have no manners.

You have no morals.

You are nothing but a— Well, get out.

I mean it.”

But when he had climbed down and untied his horse from the back of the buggy and stood in the twilight road, grinning tantalizingly at her, she could not smother her own grin as she drove off.

Yes, he was coarse, he was tricky, he was unsafe to have dealings with, and you could never tell when the dull weapon you put into his hands in an unguarded moment might turn into the keenest of blades.

But, after all, he was stimulating as—well, as a surreptitious glass of brandy!

During these months Scarlett had learned the use of brandy.

When she came home in the late afternoons, damp from the rain, cramped and aching from long hours in the buggy, nothing sustained her except the thought of the bottle hidden in her top bureau drawer, locked against Mammy’s prying eyes.

Dr. Meade had not thought to warn her that a woman in her condition should not drink, for it never occurred to him that a decent woman would drink anything stronger than scuppernong wine.

Except, of course, a glass of champagne at a wedding or a hot toddy when confined to bed with a hard cold.

Of course, there were unfortunate women who drank, to the eternal disgrace of their families, just as there were women who were insane or divorced or who believed, with Miss Susan B. Anthony, that women should have the vote.

But as much as the doctor disapproved of Scarlett, he never suspected her of drinking.

Scarlett had found that a drink of neat brandy before supper helped immeasurably and she could always chew coffee or gargle cologne to disguise the smell.

Why were people so silly about women drinking, when men could and did get reeling drunk whenever they wanted to?

Sometimes when Frank lay snoring beside her and sleep would not come, when she lay tossing, torn with fears of poverty, dreading the Yankees, homesick for Tara and yearning for Ashley, she thought she would go crazy were it not for the brandy bottle.

And when the pleasant, familiar warmth stole through her veins, her troubles began to fade.

After three drinks, she could always say to herself: “I’ll think of these things tomorrow when I can stand them better.”

But there were some nights when even brandy would not still the ache in her heart, the ache that was even stronger than fear of losing the mills, the ache to see Tara again.

Atlanta, with its noises, its new buildings, its strange faces, its narrow streets crowded with horses and wagons and bustling crowds sometimes seemed to stifle her.

She loved Atlanta but—oh, for the sweet peace and country quiet of Tara, no matter how hard the life might be!

And to be near Ashley, just to see him, to hear him speak, to be sustained by the knowledge of his love!

Each letter from Melanie, saying that they were well, each brief note from Will reporting about the plowing, the planting, the growing of the cotton made her long anew to be home again.

I’ll go in June. I can’t do anything here after that.

I’ll go home for a couple of months, she thought, and her heart would rise.

She did go home in June but not as she longed to go, for early in that month came a brief message from Will that Gerald was dead.