Gone With the Wind, Page 75

  "So," he said and there was a vibrant note almost like anger in his voice. "I see. He loves you for your mind alone."

  How dare he pry with dirty fingers, making the one beautiful sacred thing in her life seem vile? Coolly, determinedly, he was breaking down the last of her reserves and the information he wanted was forthcoming.

  "Yes, he does!" she cried, pushing back the memory of Ashley's lips.

  "My dear, he doesn't even know you've got a mind. If it was your mind that attracted him, he would not need to struggle against you, as he must have done to keep this love so -- shall we say "holy"? He could rest easily for, after all, a man can admire a woman's mind and soul and still be an honorable gentleman and true to his wife. But it must be difficult for him to reconcile the honor of the Wilkeses with coveting your body as he does."

  "You judge everybody's mind by your own vile one!"

  "Oh, I've never denied coveting you, if that's what you mean. But, thank God, I'm not bothered about matters of honor. What I want I take if I can get it, and so I wrestle neither with angels nor devils. What a merry hell you must have made for Ashley! Almost I can be sorry for him."

  "I -- I make a hell for him?"

  "Yes, you! There you are, a constant temptation to him, but like most of his breed he prefers what passes in these parts as honor to any amount of love. And it looks to me as if the poor devil now had neither love nor honor to warm himself!"

  "He has love! ... I mean, he loves me!"

  "Does he? Then answer me this and we are through for the day and you can take the money and throw it in the gutter for all I care."

  Rhett rose to his feet and threw his half-smoked cigar into the spittoon. There was about his movements the same pagan freedom and leashed power Scarlett had noted that night Atlanta fell, something sinister and a little frightening. "If he loved you, then why in hell did he permit you to come to Atlanta to get the tax money? Before I'd let a woman I loved do that, I'd --"

  "He didn't know! He had no idea that I --"

  "Doesn't it occur to you that he should have known?" There was barely suppressed savagery in his voice. "Loving you as you say he does, he should have known just what you would do when you were desperate. He should have killed you rather than let you come up here -- and to me, of all people! God in Heaven!"

  "But he didn't know!"

  "If he didn't guess it without being told, he'll never know anything about you and your precious mind."

  How unfair he was! As if Ashley was a mind reader! As if Ashley could have stopped her, even had he known! But, she knew suddenly, Ashley could have stopped her. The faintest intimation from him, in the orchard, that some day things might be different and she would never have thought of going to Rhett. A word of tenderness, even a parting caress when she was getting on the train, would have held her back. But he had only talked of honor. Yet -- was Rhett right? Should Ashley have known her mind? Swiftly she put the disloyal thought from her. Of course, he didn't suspect. Ashley would never suspect that she would even think of doing anything so immoral. Ashley was too fine to have such thoughts. Rhett was just trying to spoil her love. He was trying to tear down what was most precious to her. Some day, she thought viciously, when the store was on its feet and the mill doing nicely and she had money, she would make Rhett Butler pay for the misery and humiliation he was causing her.

  He was standing over her, looking down at her, faintly amused. The emotion which had stirred him was gone.

  "What does it all matter to you anyway?" she asked. "It's my business and Ashley's and not yours."

  He shrugged.

  "Only this. I have a deep and impersonal admiration for your endurance, Scarlett, and I do not like to see your spirit crushed beneath too many millstones. There's Tara. That's a man-sized job in itself. There's your sick father added on. He'll never be any help to you. And the girls and the darkies. And now you've taken on a husband and probably Miss Pittypat, too. You've enough burdens without Ashley Wilkes and his family on your hands."

  "He's not on my hands. He helps --"

  "Oh, for God's sake," he said impatiently. "Don't let's have any more of that. He's no help. He's on your hands and he'll be on them, or on somebody's, till he dies. Personally, I'm sick of him as a topic of conversation. ... How much money do you want?"

  Vituperative words rushed to her lips. After all his insults, after dragging from her those things which were most precious to her and trampling on them, he still thought she would take his money!

  But the words were checked unspoken. How wonderful it would be to scorn his offer and order him out of the store! But only the truly rich and the truly secure could afford this luxury. So long as she was poor, just so long would she have to endure such scenes as this. But when she was rich -- oh, what a beautiful warming thought that was! -- when she was rich, she wouldn't stand anything she didn't like, do without anything she desired or even be polite to people unless they pleased her.

  I shall tell them all to go to Halifax, she thought, and Rhett Butler will be the first one!

  The pleasure in the thought brought a sparkle into her green eyes and a half-smile to her lips. Rhett smiled too.

  "You're a pretty person, Scarlett," he said. "Especially when you are meditating devilment. And just for the sight of that dimple I'll buy you a baker's dozen of mules if you want them."

  The front door opened and the counter boy entered, picking his teeth with a quill. Scarlett rose, pulled her shawl about her and tied her bonnet strings firmly under her chin. Her mind was made up.

  "Are you busy this afternoon? Can you come with me now?" she asked.

  "Where?"

  "I want you to drive to the mill with me. I promised Frank I wouldn't drive out of town by myself."

  "To the mill in this rain?"

  "Yes, I want to buy that mill now, before you change your mind."

  He laughed so loudly the boy behind the counter started and looked at him curiously.

  "Have you forgotten you are married? Mrs. Kennedy can't afford to be seen driving out into the country with that Butler reprobate, who isn't received in the best parlors. Have you forgotten your reputation?"

  "Reputation, fiddle-dee-dee! I want that mill before you change your mind or Frank finds out that I'm buying it. Don't be a slow poke, Rhett. What's a little rain? Let's hurry."

  That sawmill! Frank groaned every time he thought of it, cursing himself for ever mentioning it to her. It was bad enough for her to sell her earrings to Captain Butler (of all people!) and buy the mill without even consulting her own husband about it, but it was worse still that she did not turn it over to him to operate. That looked bad. As if she did not trust him or his judgment.

  Frank, in common with all men he knew, felt that a wife should be guided by her husband's superior knowledge, should accept his opinions in full and have none of her own. He would have given most women their own way. Women were such funny little creatures and it never hurt to humor their small whims. Mild and gentle by nature, it was not in him to deny a wife much. He would have enjoyed gratifying the foolish notions of some soft little person and scolding her lovingly for her stupidity and extravagance. But the things Scarlett set her mind on were unthinkable.

  That sawmill, for example. It was the shock of his life when she told him with a sweet smile, in answer to his questions, that she intended to run it herself. "Go into the lumber business myself," was the way she put it. Frank would never forget the horror of that moment. Go into business for herself! It was unthinkable. There were no women in business in Atlanta. In fact, Frank had never heard of a woman in business anywhere. If women were so unfortunate as to be compelled to make a little money to assist their families in these hard times, they made it in quiet womanly ways -- baking as Mrs. Merriwether was doing, or painting china and sewing and keeping boarders, like Mrs. Elsing and Fanny, or teaching school like Mrs. Meade or giving music lessons like Mrs. Bonnell. These ladies made money but they kept themselves at home while they did i
t, as a woman should. But for a woman to leave the protection of her home and venture out into the rough world of men, competing with them in business, rubbing shoulders with them, being exposed to insult and gossip ... Especially when she wasn't forced to do it, when she had a husband amply able to provide for her!

  Frank had hoped she was only teasing or playing a joke on him, a joke of questionable taste, but he soon found she meant what she said. She did operate the sawmill. She rose earlier than he did to drive out Peachtree road and frequently did not come home until long after he had locked up the store and returned to Aunt Pitty's for supper. She drove the long miles to the mill with only the disapproving Uncle Peter to protect her and the woods were full of free niggers and Yankee riffraff. Frank couldn't go with her, the store took all of his time, but when he protested, she said shortly: "If I don't keep an eye on that slick scamp, Johnson, he'll steal my lumber and sell it and put the money in his pocket. When I can get a good man to run the mill for me, then I won't have to go out there so often. Then I can spend my time in town selling lumber."

  Selling lumber in town! That was worst of all. She frequently did take a day off from the mill and peddle lumber and, on those days, Frank wished he could hide in the dark back room of his store and see no one. His wife selling lumber!

  And people were talking terrible about her. Probably about him too, for permitting her to behave in so unwomanly a fashion. It embarrassed him to face his customers over the counter and hear them say: "I saw Mrs. Kennedy a few minutes ago over at ..." Everyone took pains to tell him what she did. Everyone was talking about what happened over where the new hotel was being built. Scarlett had driven up just as Tommy Wellburn was buying some lumber from another man and she climbed down out of the buggy among the rough Irish masons who were laying the foundations, and told Tommy briefly that he was being cheated. She said her lumber was better and cheaper too, and to prove it she ran up a long column of figures in her head and gave him an estimate then and there. It was bad enough that she had intruded herself among strange rough workmen, but it was still worse for a woman to show publicly that she could do mathematics like that. When Tommy accepted her estimate and gave her the order, Scarlett had not taken her departure speedily and meekly but had idled about, talking to Johnnie Gallegher, the foreman of the Irish workers, a hard-bitten little gnome of a man who had a very bad reputation. The town talked about it for weeks.

  On top of everything else, she was actually making money out of the mill, and no man could feel right about a wife who succeeded in so unwomanly an activity. Nor did she turn over the money or any part of it to him to use in the store. Most of it went to Tara and she wrote interminable letters to Will Benteen telling him just how it should be spent. Furthermore, she told Frank that if the repairs at Tara could ever be completed, she intended to lend out her money on mortgages.

  "My! My!" moaned Frank whenever he thought of this. A woman had no business even knowing what a mortgage was.

  Scarlett was full of plans these days and each one of them seemed worse to Frank than the previous one. She even talked of building a saloon on the property where her warehouse had been until Sherman burned it. Frank was no teetotaler but he feverishly protested against the idea. Owning saloon property was a bad business, an unlucky business, almost as bad as renting to a house of prostitution. Just why it was bad, he could not explain to her and to his lame arguments she said "Fiddle-dee-dee!"

  "Saloons are always good tenants. Uncle Henry said so," she told him. "They always pay their rent and, look here, Frank, I could put up a cheap saloon out of poor-grade lumber I can't sell and get good rent for it, and with the rent money and the money from the mill and what I could get from mortgages, I could buy some more sawmills."

  "Sugar, you don't need any more sawmills!" cried Frank, appalled. "What you ought to do is sell the one you've got. It's wearing you out and you know what trouble you have keeping free darkies at work there --"

  "Free darkies are certainly worthless," Scarlett agreed, completely ignoring his hint that she should sell. "Mr. Johnson says he never knows when he comes to work in the morning whether he'll have a full crew or not. You just can't depend on the darkies any more. They work a day or two and then lay off till they've spent their wages, and the whole crew is like as not to quit overnight. The more I see of emancipation the more criminal I think it is. It's just ruined the darkies. Thousands of them aren't working at all and the ones we can get to work at the mill are so lazy and shiftless they aren't worth having. And if you so much as swear at them, much less hit them a few licks for the good of their souls, the Freedmen's Bureau is down on you like a duck on a June bug."

  "Sugar, you aren't letting Mr. Johnson beat those --"

  "Of course not," she returned impatiently. "Didn't I just say the Yankees would put me in jail if I did?"

  "I'll bet your pa never hit a darky a lick in his life," said Frank.

  "Well, only one. A stable boy who didn't rub down his horse after a day's hunt. But, Frank, it was different then. Free issue niggers are something else, and a good whipping would do some of them a lot of good."

  Frank was not only amazed at his wife's views and her plans but at the change which had come over her in the few months since their marriage. This wasn't the soft, sweet feminine person he had taken to wife. In the brief period of the courtship, he thought he had never known a woman more attractively feminine in her reactions to life, ignorant timid and helpless. Now her reactions were all masculine. Despite her pink cheeks and dimples and pretty smiles, she talked and acted like a man. Her voice was brisk and decisive and she made up her mind instantly and with no girlish shilly-shallying. She knew what she wanted and she went after it by the shortest route, like a man, not by the hidden and circuitous routes peculiar to women.

  It was not that Frank had never seen commanding women before this. Atlanta, like all Southern towns, had its share of dowagers whom no one cared to cross. No one could be more dominating than stout Mrs. Merriwether, more imperious than frail Mrs. Elsing, more artful in securing her own ends than the silver-haired sweet-voiced Mrs. Whiting. But no matter what devices these ladies employed in order to get their own way, they were always feminine devices. They made a point of being deferential to men's opinions, whether they were guided by them or not. They had the politeness to appear to be guided by what men said, and that was what mattered. But Scarlett was guided by no one but herself and was conducting her affairs in a masculine way which had the whole town talking about her.

  "And," thought Frank miserably, "probably talking about me too, for letting her act so unwomanly."

  Then, there was that Butler man. His frequent calls at Aunt Pitty's house were the greatest humiliation of all. Frank had always disliked him, even when he had done business with him before the war. He often cursed the day he had brought Rhett to Twelve Oaks and introduced him to his friends. He despised him for the cold-blooded way he had acted in his speculations during the war and for the fact that he had not been in the army. Rhett's eight months' service with the Confederacy was known only to Scarlett for Rhett had begged her, with mock fear, not to reveal his "shame" to anyone. Most of all Frank had contempt for him for holding on to the Confederate gold, when honest men like Admiral Bulloch and others confronted with the same situation had turned back thousands to the Federal treasury. But whether Frank liked it or not Rhett was a frequent caller.

  Ostensibly it was Miss Pitty he came to see and she had no better sense than to believe it and give herself airs over his visits. But Frank had an uncomfortable feeling that Miss Pitty was not the attraction which brought him. Little Wade was very fond of him, though the boy was shy of most people, and even called him "Uncle Rhett," which annoyed Frank. And Frank could not help remembering that Rhett had squired Scarlett about during the war days and there had been talk about them then. He imagined there might be even worse talk about them now. None of his friends had the courage to mention anything of this sort to Frank, for all their outs
poken words on Scarlett's conduct in the matter of the mill. But he could not help noticing that he and Scarlett were less frequently invited to meals and parties and fewer and fewer people came to call on them. Scarlett disliked most of her neighbors and was too busy with her mill to care about seeing the ones she did like, so the lack of calls did not disturb her. But Frank felt it keenly.

  All of his life, Frank had been under the domination of the phrase "What will the neighbors say?" and he was defenseless against the shocks of his wife's repeated disregard of the proprieties. He felt that everyone disapproved of Scarlett and was contemptuous of him for permitting her to "unsex herself." She did so many things a husband should not permit, according to his views, but if he ordered her to stop them, argued or even criticized, a storm broke on his head.

  "My! My!" he thought helplessly. "She can get mad quicker and stay mad longer than any woman I ever saw!"

  Even at the times when things were most pleasant, it was amazing how completely and how quickly the teasing, affectionate wife who hummed to herself as she went about the house could be transformed into an entirely different person. He had only to say: "Sugar, if I were you, I wouldn't --" and the tempest would break.

  Her black brows rushed together to meet in a sharp angle over her nose and Frank cowered, almost visibly. She had the temper of a Tartar and the rages of a wild cat and, at such times, she did not seem to care what she said or how much it hurt Clouds of gloom hung over the house on such occasions. Frank went early to the store and stayed late. Pitty scrambled into her bedroom like a rabbit panting for its burrow. Wade and Uncle Peter retired to the carriage house and Cookie kept to her kitchen and forbore to raise her voice to praise the Lord in song. Only Mammy endured Scarlett's temper with equanimity and Mammy had had many years of training with Gerald O'Hara and his explosions.

  Scarlett did not mean to be short tempered and she really wanted to make Frank a good wife, for she was fond of him and grateful for his help in saving Tara. But he did try her patience to the breaking point so often and in so many different ways.