Gone With the Wind, Page 88

  'They don't talk of anything else," thought Scarlett. "Nothing but the war. Always the war. And they'll never talk of anything but the war. No, not until they die."

  She looked about, seeing little boys lying in the crooks of their fathers' arms, breath coming fast, eyes glowing, as they heard of midnight stories and wild cavalry dashes and flags planted on enemy breastworks. They were hearing drums and bugles and the Rebel yell, seeing footsore men going by in the rain with torn flags slanting.

  "And these children will never talk of anything else either. They'll think it was wonderful and glorious to fight the Yankees and come home blind and crippled -- or not come home at all. They all like to remember the war, to talk about it. But I don't. I don't even like to think about it. I'd forget it all if I could -- oh, if I only could!"

  She listened with flesh crawling as Melanie told tales of Tara, making Scarlett a heroine as she faced the invaders and saved Charles' sword, bragging how Scarlett had put out the fire. Scarlett took no pleasure or pride in the memory of these things. She did not want to think of them at all.

  "Oh, why can't they forget? Why can't they look forward and not back? We were fools to fight that war. And the sooner we forget it, the better we'll be."

  But no one wanted to forget, no one, it seemed, except herself, so Scarlett was glad when she could truthfully tell Melanie that she was embarrassed at appearing, even in the darkness. This explanation was readily understood by Melanie who was hypersensitive about all matters relating to childbirth. Melanie wanted another baby badly, but both Dr. Meade and Dr. Fontaine had said another child would cost her her life. So, only half resigned to her fate, she spent most of her time with Scarlett, vicariously enjoying a pregnancy not her own. To Scarlett, scarcely wanting her coming child and irritated at its untimeliness, this attitude seemed the height of sentimental stupidity. But she had a guilty sense of pleasure that the doctors' edict had made impossible any real intimacy between Ashley and his wife.

  Scarlett saw Ashley frequently now but she never saw him alone. He came by the house every night on his way home from the mill to report on the day's work, but Frank and Pitty were usually present or, worse still, Melanie and India. She could only ask businesslike questions and make suggestions and then say: "It was nice of you to come by. Good night."

  If only she wasn't having a baby! Here was a God-given opportunity to ride out to the mill with him every morning, through the lonely woods, far from prying eyes, where they could imagine themselves back In the County again in the unhurried days before the war.

  No, she wouldn't try to make him say one word of love! She wouldn't refer to love in any way. She'd sworn an oath to herself that she would never do that again. But, perhaps if she were alone with him once more, he might drop that mask of impersonal courtesy he had worn since coming to Atlanta. Perhaps he might be his old self again, be the Ashley she had known before the barbecue, before any word of love had been spoken between them. If they could not be lovers, they could be friends again and she could warm her cold and lonely heart in the glow of his friendship.

  "If only I could get this baby over and done with," she thought impatiently, "then I could ride with him every day and we could talk --"

  It was not only the desire to be with him that made her writhe with helpless impatience at her confinement. The mills needed her. The mills had been losing money ever since she retired from active supervision, leaving Hugh and Ashley in charge.

  Hugh was so incompetent, for all that he tried so hard. He was a poor trader and a poorer boss of labor. Anyone could Jew him down on prices. If any slick contractor chose to say that the lumber was of an inferior grade and not worth the price asked, Hugh felt that all a gentleman could do was to apologize and take a lower price. When she heard of the price he received for a thousand feet of flooring, she burst into angry tears. The best grade of flooring the mill had ever turned out and he had practically given it away! And he couldn't manage his labor crews. The negroes insisted on being paid every day and they frequently got drunk on their wages and did not turn up for work the next morning. On these occasions Hugh was forced to hunt up new workmen and the mill was late in starting. With these difficulties Hugh didn't get into town to sell the lumber for days on end.

  Seeing the profits slip from Hugh's fingers, Scarlett became frenzied at her impotence and his stupidity. Just as soon as the baby was born and she could go back to work, she would get rid of Hugh and hire some one else. Anyone would do better. And she would never fool with free niggers again. How could anyone get any work done with free niggers quitting all the time?

  "Frank," she said, after a stormy interview with Hugh over his missing workmen, I've about made up my mind that I'll lease convicts to work the mills. A while back I was talking to Johnnie Gallegher, Tommy Wellburn's foreman, about the trouble we were having getting any work out of the darkies and he asked me why I didn't get convicts. It sounds like a good idea to me. He said I could sublease them for next to nothing and feed them dirt cheap. And he said I could get work out of them in any way I liked, without having the Freedman's Bureau swarming down on me like hornets, sticking their bills into things that aren't any of their business. And just as soon as Johnnie Gallegher's contract with Tommy is up, I'm going to hire him to run Hugh's mill. Any man who can get work out of that bunch of wild Irish he bosses can certainly get plenty of work out of convicts."

  Convicts! Frank was speechless. Leasing convicts was the very worst of all the wild schemes Scarlett had ever suggested, worse even than her notion of building a saloon.

  At least, it seemed worse to Frank and the conservative circles in which he moved. This new system of leasing convicts had come into being because of the poverty of the state after the war. Unable to support the convicts, the State was hiring them out to those needing large labor crews in the building of railroads, in turpentine forests and lumber camps. While Frank and his quiet churchgoing friends realized the necessity of the system, they deplored it just the same. Many of them had not even believed in slavery and they thought this was far worse than slavery had ever been.

  And Scarlett wanted to lease convicts! Frank knew that if she did he could never hold up his head again. This was far worse than owning and operating the mills herself, or anything else she had done. His past objections had always been coupled with the question: "What will people say?" But this -- this went deeper than fear of public opinion. He felt that it was a traffic in human bodies on a par with prostitution, a sin that would be on his soul if he permitted her to do it.

  From this conviction of wrongness, Frank gathered courage to forbid Scarlett to do such a thing, and so strong were his remarks that she, startled, relapsed into silence. Finally to quiet him, she said meekly she hadn't really meant it She was just so outdone with Hugh and the free niggers she had lost her temper. Secretly, she still thought about it and with some longing. Convict labor would settle one of her hardest problems, but if Frank was going to take on so about it--

  She sighed. If even one of the mills were making money, she could stand it. But Ashley was faring little better with his mill than Hugh.

  At first Scarlett was shocked and disappointed that Ashley did not immediately take hold and make the mill pay double what it had paid under her management. He was so smart and he had read so many books and there was no reason at all why he should not make a brilliant success and lots of money. But he was no more successful than Hugh. His inexperience, his errors, his utter lack of business judgment and his scruples about close dealing were the same as Hugh's.

  Scarlett's love hastily found excuses for him and she did not consider the two men in the same light. Hugh was just hopelessly stupid, while Ashley was merely new at the business. Still, unbidden, came the thought that Ashley could never make a quick estimate in his head and give a price that was correct, as she could. And she sometimes wondered if he'd ever learn to distinguish between planking and sills. And because he was a gentleman and himself trustworthy, he trusted e
very scoundrel who came along and several times would have lost money for her if she had not tactfully intervened. And if he liked a person -- and he seemed to like so many people! -- he sold them lumber on credit without ever thinking to find out if they had money in the bank or property. He was as bad as Frank in that respect.

  But surely he would learn! And while he was learning she had a fond and maternal indulgence and patience for his errors. Every evening when he called at her house, weary and discouraged, she was tireless in her tactful, helpful suggestions. But for all her encouragement and cheer, there was a queer dead look in his eyes. She could not understand it and it frightened her. He was different, so different from the man he used to be. If only she could see him alone, perhaps she could discover the reason.

  The situation gave her many sleepless nights. She worried about Ashley, both because she knew he was unhappy and because she knew his unhappiness wasn't helping him to become a good lumber dealer. It was a torture to have her mills in the hands of two men with no more business sense than Hugh and Ashley, heartbreaking to see her competitors taking her best customers away when she had worked so hard and planned so carefully for these helpless months. Oh, if she could only get back to work again! She would take Ashley in hand and then he would certainly learn. And Johnnie Gallegher could run the other mill, and she could handle the selling, and then everything would be fine. As for Hugh, he could drive a delivery wagon if he still wanted to work for her. That was all he was good for.

  Of course, Gallegher looked like an unscrupulous man, for all of his smartness, but -- who else could she get? Why had the other men who were both smart and honest been so perverse about working for her? If she only had one of them working for her now in place of Hugh, she wouldn't have to worry so much, but --

  Tommy Wellburn, in spite of his crippled back, was the busiest contractor in town and coining money, so people said. Mrs. Merriwether and Rene were prospering and now had opened a bakery downtown. Rene was managing it with true French thrift and Grandpa Merriwether, glad to escape from his chimney corner, was driving Rene's pie wagon. The Simmons boys were so busy they were operating their brick kiln with three shifts of labor a day. And Kells Whiting was cleaning up money with his hair straightener, because he told the negroes they wouldn't ever be permitted to vote the Republican ticket if they had kinky hair.

  It was the same with all the smart young men she knew, the doctors, the lawyers, the storekeepers. The apathy which had clutched them immediately after the war had completely disappeared and they were too busy building their own fortunes to help her build hers. The ones who were not busy were the men of Hugh's type -- or Ashley's.

  What a mess it was to try to run a business and have a baby too!

  "I'll never have another one," she decided firmly. "I'm not going to be like other women and have a baby every year. Good Lord, that would mean six months out of the year when I'd have to be away from the mills! And I see now I can't afford to be away from them even one day. I shall simply tell Frank that I won't have any more children."

  Frank wanted a big family, but she could manage Frank somehow. Her mind was made up. This was her last child. The mills were far more important.

  CHAPTER XLII

  SCARLETT'S CHILD was a girl, a small baldheaded mite, ugly as a hairless monkey and absurdly like Frank. No one except the doting father could see anything beautiful about her, but the neighbors were charitable enough to say that all ugly babies turned out pretty, eventually. She was named Ella Lorena, Ella for her grandmother Ellen, and Lorena because it was the most fashionable name of the day for girls, even as Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were popular for boys and Abraham Lincoln and Emancipation for negro children.

  She was born in the middle of a week when frenzied excitement gripped Atlanta and the air was tense with expectation of disaster. A negro who had boasted of rape had actually been arrested, but before he could be brought to trial the jail had been raided by the Ku Klux Klan and he had been quietly hanged. The Klan had acted to save the as yet unnamed victim from having to testify in open court. Rather than have her appear and advertise her shame, her father and brother would have shot her, so lynching the negro seemed a sensible solution to the townspeople, in fact, the only decent solution possible. But the military authorities were in a fury. They saw no reason why the girl should mind testifying publicly.

  The soldiers made arrests right and left, swearing to wipe out the Klan if they had to put every white man in Atlanta in jail. The negroes, frightened and sullen, muttered of retaliatory house burnings. The air was thick with rumors of wholesale hangings by the Yankees should the guilty parties be found and of a concerted uprising against the whites by the negroes. The people of the town stayed at home behind locked doors and shuttered windows, the men fearing to go to their businesses and leave their women and children unprotected.

  Scarlett, lying exhausted in bed, feebly and silently thanked God that Ashley had too much sense to belong to the Klan and Frank was too old and poor spirited. How dreadful it would be to know that the Yankees might swoop down and arrest them at any minute! Why didn't the crack-brained young fools in the Klan leave bad enough alone and not stir up the Yankees like this? Probably the girl hadn't been raped after all. Probably she'd just been frightened silly and, because of her, a lot of men might lose their lives.

  In this atmosphere, as nerve straining as watching a slow fuse burn toward a barrel of gunpowder, Scarlett came rapidly back to strength. The healthy vigor which had carried her through the hard days at Tara stood her in good stead now, and within two weeks of Ella Lorena's birth she was strong enough to sit up and chafe at her inactivity. In three weeks she was up, declaring she had to see to the mills. They were standing idle because both Hugh and Ashley feared to leave their families alone all day.

  Then the blow fell.

  Frank, full of the pride of new fatherhood, summoned up courage enough to forbid Scarlett leaving the house while conditions were so dangerous. His commands would not have worried her at all and she would have gone about her business in spite of them, if he had not put her horse and buggy in the livery stable and ordered that they should not be surrendered to anyone except himself. To make matters worse, he and Mammy had patiently searched the house while she was ill and unearthed her hidden store of money. And Frank had deposited it in the bank in his own name, so now she could not even hire a rig.

  Scarlett raged at both Frank and Mammy, then was reduced to begging and finally cried all one morning like a furious thwarted child. But for all her pains she heard only: "There, Sugar! You're just a sick little girl." And: "Miss Scarlett, ef you doan quit cahyin' on so, you gwine sour yo' milk an' de baby have colic, sho as gun's iron."

  In a furious temper, Scarlett charged through her back yard to Melanie's house and there unburdened herself at the top of her voice, declaring she would walk to the mills, she would go about Atlanta telling everyone what a varmint she had married, she would not be treated like a naughty simple-minded child. She would carry a pistol and shoot anyone who threatened her. She had shot one man and she would love, yes, love to shoot another. She would --

  Melanie who feared to venture onto her own front porch was appalled by such threats.

  "Oh, you must not risk yourself! I should die if anything happened to you! Oh, please --"

  "I will! I will! I will walk --"

  Melanie looked at her and saw that this was not the hysteria of a woman still weak from childbirth. There was the same breakneck, headlong determination in Scarlett's face that Melanie had often seen in Gerald O'Hara's face when his mind was made up. She put her arms around Scarlett's waist and held her tightly.

  "It's all my fault for not being brave like you and for keeping Ashley at home with me all this time when he should have been at the mill. Oh, dear! I'm such a ninny! Darling, I'll tell Ashley I'm not a bit frightened and I'll come over and stay with you and Aunt Pitty and he can go back to work and -- "

  Not even to herself w
ould Scarlett admit that she did not think Ashley could cope with the situation alone and she shouted: "You'll do nothing of the kind! What earthly good would Ashley do at work if he was worried about you every minute? Everybody is just so hateful! Even Uncle Peter refuses to go out with me! But I don't care! I'll go alone. I'll walk every step of the way and pick up a crew of darkies somewhere --"

  "Oh, no! You mustn't do that! Something dreadful might happen to you. They say that Shantytown settlement on the Decatur road is just full of mean darkies and you'd have to pass right by it. Let me think -- Darling, promise me you won't do anything today and I'll think of something. Promise me you'll go home and lie down. You look right peaked. Promise me."

  Because she was too exhausted by her anger to do otherwise, Scarlett sulkily promised and went home, haughtily refusing any overtures of peace from her household.

  That afternoon a strange figure stumped through Melanie's hedge and across Pitty's back yard. Obviously, he was one of those men whom Mammy and Dilcey referred to as "de riffraff whut Miss Melly pick up off de streets an' let sleep in her cellar."

  There were three rooms in the basement of Melanie's house which formerly had been servants' quarters and a wine room. Now Dilcey occupied one, and the other two were in constant use by a stream of miserable and ragged transients. No one but Melanie knew whence they came or where they were going and no one but she knew where she collected them. Perhaps the negroes were right and she did pick them up from the streets. But even as the great and the near great gravitated to her small parlor, so unfortunates found their way to her cellar where they were fed, bedded and sent on their way with packages of food. Usually the occupants of the rooms were former Confederate soldiers of the rougher, illiterate type, homeless men, men without families, beating their way about the country in hope of finding work.

  Frequently, brown and withered country women with broods of tow-haired silent children spent the night there, women widowed by the war, dispossessed of their farms, seeking relatives who were scattered and lost. Sometimes the neighborhood was scandalized by the presence of foreigners, speaking little or no English, who had been drawn South by glowing tales of fortunes easily made. Once a Republican had slept there. At least, Mammy insisted he was a Republican, saying she could smell a Republican, same as a horse could smell a rattlesnake; but no one believed Mammy's story, for there must be some limit even to Melanie's charity. At least everyone hoped so.