Gone with the Wind (134 page)

“I'll write you. Let me know if you change your mind.”

“Aren't you—”

“Well?” He seemed impatient to be off.

“Aren't you going to kiss me good-by?” she whispered, mindful of the ears of the house.

“Don't you think you've had enough kissing for one evening?” he retorted and grinned down at her. “To think of a modest, well-brought-up young woman— Well, I told you it would be fun, didn't I?”

“Oh, you are impossible!” she cried in wrath, not caring if Mammy did hear. “And I don't care if you never come back.”

She turned and flounced toward the stairs, expecting to feel his warm hand on her arm, stopping her. But he only pulled open the front door and a cold draft swept in.

“But I will come back,” he said and went out, leaving her on the bottom step looking at the closed door.

*     *     *

The ring Rhett brought back from England was large indeed, so large it embarrassed Scarlett to wear it. She loved gaudy and expensive jewelry but she had an uneasy feeling that everyone was saying, with perfect truth, that this ring was vulgar. The central stone was a four-carat diamond and, surrounding it, were a number of emeralds. It reached to the knuckle of her finger and gave her hand the appearance of being weighted down. Scarlett had a suspicion that Rhett had gone to great pains to have the ring made up and, for pure meanness, had ordered it made as ostentatious as possible.

Until Rhett was back in Atlanta and the ring on her finger she told no one, not even her family, of her intentions, and when she did announce her engagement a storm of bitter gossip broke out. Since the Klan affair Rhett and Scarlett had been, with the exception of the Yankees and Carpetbaggers, the town's most unpopular citizens. Everyone had disapproved of Scarlett since the far-away day when she abandoned the weeds worn for Charlie Hamilton. Their disapproval had grown stronger because of her unwomanly conduct in the matter of the mills, her immodesty in showing herself when she was pregnant and so many other things. But when she brought about the death of Frank and Tommy and jeopardized the lives of a dozen other men, their dislike flamed into public condemnation.

As for Rhett, he had enjoyed the town's hatred since his speculations during the war and he had not further endeared himself to his fellow citizens by his alliances with the Republicans since then. But, oddly enough, the fact that he had saved the lives of some of Atlanta's most prominent men was what aroused the hottest hate of Atlanta's ladies.

It was not that they regretted their men were still alive. It was that they bitterly resented owing the men's lives to such a man as Rhett and to such an embarrassing trick. For months they had writhed under Yankee laughter and scorn, and the ladies felt and said that if Rhett really had the good of the Klan at heart he would have managed the affair in a more seemly fashion. They said he had deliberately dragged in Belle Watling to put the nice people of the town in a disgraceful position. And so he deserved neither thanks for rescuing the men nor forgiveness for his past sins.

These women, so swift to kindness, so tender to the sorrowing, so untiring in times of stress, could be as implacable as furies to any renegade who broke one small law of their unwritten code. This code was simple. Reverence for the Confederacy, honor to the veterans, loyalty to old forms, pride in poverty, open hands to friends and undying hatred to Yankees. Between them, Scarlett and Rhett had outraged every tenet of this code.

The men whose lives Rhett had saved attempted, out of decency and a sense of gratitude, to keep their women silent but they had little success. Before the announcement of their coming marriage, the two had been unpopular enough but people could still be polite to them in a formal way. Now even that cold courtesy was no longer possible. The news of their engagement came like an explosion, unexpected and shattering, rocking the town, and even the mildest-mannered women spoke their minds heatedly. Marrying barely a year after Frank's death and she had killed him! And marrying that Butler man who owned a brothel and who was in with the Yankees and Carpetbaggers in all kinds of thieving schemes! Separately, the two of them could be endured, but the brazen combination of Scarlett and Rhett was too much to be borne. Common and vile, both of them! They ought to be run out of town!

Atlanta might perhaps have been more tolerant toward the two if the news of their engagement had not come at a time when Rhett's Carpetbagger and Scallawag cronies were more odious in the sight of respectable citizens than they had ever been before. Public feeling against the Yankees and all their allies was at fever heat at the very time when the town learned of the engagement, for the last citadel of Georgia's resistance to Yankee rule
had just fallen. The long campaign which had begun when Sherman moved southward from above Dalton, four years before, had finally reached its climax, and the state's humiliation was complete.

Three years of Reconstruction had passed and they had been three years of terrorism. Everyone had thought that conditions were already as bad as they could ever be. But now Georgia was discovering that Reconstruction at its worst had just begun.

For three years the Federal government had been trying to impose alien ideas and an alien rule upon Georgia and, with an army to enforce its commands, it had largely succeeded. But only the power of the military upheld the new regime. The state was under the Yankee rule but not by the state's consent. Georgia's leaders had kept on battling for the state's right to govern itself according to its own ideas. They had continued resisting all efforts to force them to bow down and accept the dictates of Washington as their own state law.

Officially, Georgia's government had never capitulated but it had been a futile fight, an ever-losing fight. It was a fight that could not win but it had, at least, postponed the inevitable. Already many other Southern states had illiterate negroes in high public office and legislatures dominated by negroes and Carpetbaggers. But Georgia, by its stubborn resistance, had so far escaped this final degradation. For the greater part of three years, the state's capital had remained in the control of white men and Democrats. With Yankee soldiers everywhere, the state officials could do little but protest and resist. Their power was nominal but they had at least been able to keep the state government in the hands of native Georgians. Now even that last stronghold had fallen.

Just as Johnston and his men had been driven back step by step from Dalton to Atlanta, four years before, so had the Georgia Democrats been driven back little by little, from 1865 on. The power of the Federal government over the state's affairs and the lives of its citizens had been steadily made greater and greater. Force had been piled on top of force and military edicts in increasing numbers had rendered the civil authority more and more impotent. Finally, with Georgia in the status of a military province, the polls had been ordered thrown open to the negroes, whether the state's laws permitted it or not.

A week before Scarlett and Rhett announced their engagement, an election for governor had been held. The Southern Democrats had General John B. Gordon, one of Georgia's best loved and most honored citizens, as their candidate. Opposing him was a Republican named Bullock. The election had lasted three days instead of one. Trainloads of negroes had been rushed from town to town, voting at every precinct along the way. Of course, Bullock had won.

If the capture of Georgia by Sherman had caused bitterness, the final capture of the state's capital by the Carpetbaggers, Yankees and negroes caused an intensity of bitterness such as the state had never known before. Atlanta and Georgia seethed and raged.

And Rhett Butler was a friend of the hated Bullock!

Scarlett, with her usual disregard for all matters not directly under her nose, had scarcely known an election was being held. Rhett had taken no part in the election and his relations with the Yankees were no different from what they had always been. But the fact remained that Rhett was a Scallawag and a friend of Bullock. And, if the marriage went through, Scarlett also would be turning
Scallawag. Atlanta was in no mood to be tolerant or charitable toward anyone in the enemy camp and, the news of the engagement coming when it did, the town remembered all of the evil things about the pair and none of the good.

Scarlett knew the town was rocking but she did not realize the extent of public feeling until Mrs. Merriwether, urged on by her church circle, took it upon herself to speak to her for her own good.

“Because your own dear mother is dead and Miss Pitty, not being a matron, is not qualified to—er, well, to talk to you upon such a subject, I feel that I must warn you, Scarlett. Captain Butler is not the kind of a man for any woman of good family to marry. He is a—”

“He managed to save Grandpa Merriwether's neck and your nephew's too.”

Mrs. Merriwether swelled. Hardly an hour before she had had an irritating talk with Grandpa. The old man had remarked that she must not value his hide very much if she did not feel some gratitude to Rhett Butler, even if the man was a Scallawag and a scoundrel.

“He only did that as a dirty trick on us all, Scarlett, to embarrass us in front of the Yankees,” Mrs. Merriwether continued. “You know as well as I do that the man is a rogue. He always has been and now he's unspeakable. He is simply not the kind of man decent people receive.”

“No? That's strange, Mrs. Merriwether. He was in your parlor often enough during the war. And he gave Maybelle her white satin wedding dress, didn't he? Or is my memory wrong?”

“Things were so different during the war and nice people associated with many men who were not quite—It was for the Cause and very proper, too. Surely you
can't be thinking of marrying a man who wasn't in the army, who jeered at men who did enlist?”

“He was, too, in the army. He was in the army eight months. He was in the last campaign and fought at Franklin and was with General Johnston when he surrendered.”

“I had not heard that,” said Mrs. Merriwether and she looked as if she did not believe it either. “But he wasn't wounded,” she added, triumphantly.

“Lots of men weren't.”

“Everybody who was anybody got wounded. I know no one who wasn't wounded.”

Scarlett was goaded.

“Then I guess all the men you knew were such fools they didn't know when to come in out of a shower of rain—or of minie balls. Now, let me tell you this, Mrs. Merriwether, and you can take it back to your busybody friends. I'm going to marry Captain Butler and I wouldn't care if he'd fought on the Yankee side.”

When that worthy matron went out of the house with her bonnet jerking with rage, Scarlett knew she had an open enemy now instead of a disapproving friend. But she did not care. Nothing Mrs. Merriwether could say or do could hurt her. She did not care what anyone said—anyone except Mammy.

Scarlett had borne with Pitty's swooning at the news and had steeled herself to see Ashley look suddenly old and avoid her eyes as he wished her happiness. She had been amused and irritated at the letters from Aunt Pauline and Aunt Eulalie in Charleston, horror struck at the news, forbidding the marriage, telling her it would not only ruin her social position but endanger theirs. She had even laughed when Melanie with a worried pucker
in her brows said loyally: “Of course, Captain Butler is much nicer than most people realize and he was so kind and clever, the way he saved Ashley. And after all, he did fight for the Confederacy. But, Scarlett, don't you think you'd better not decide so hastily?”

No, she didn't mind what anybody said, except Mammy. Mammy's words were the ones that made her most angry and brought the greatest hurt.

“Ah has seed you do a heap of things dat would hu't Miss Ellen, did she know. An' it has done sorrered me a plen'y. But disyere is de wust yit. Mahyin' trash! Yas'm, Ah said trash! Doan go tellin' me he come frum fine folkses. Dat doan mek no diffunce. Trash come outer de high places, same as de low, and he trash! Yas'm, Miss Scarlett, Ah's seed you tek Mist' Charles 'way frum Miss Honey w'en you din' keer nuthin' 'bout him. An' Ah's seed you rob yo' own sister of Mist' Frank. An' Ah's heshed mah mouf 'bout a heap of things you is done, lak sellin' po lumber fer good, an' lyin' 'bout de other lumber gempmums, an ridin' roun' by yo'seff, exposing yo'seff ter free issue niggers an' gittin' Mist' Frank shot, an' not feedin' dem po' convicts nuff ter keep dey souls in dey bodies. Ah's done heshed mah mouf, even ef Miss Ellen in de Promise lan' wuz sayin' ‘Mammy, Mammy! You ain' look affer mah chile right!' Yas'm, Ah's stood fer all dat but Ah ain' gwine stand fer dis, Miss Scarlett. You kain mahy wid trash. Not w'ile Ah got breaf in mah body.”

“I shall marry whom I please,” said Scarlett coldly. “I think you are forgetting your place, Mammy.”

“An' high time, too! Ef Ah doan say dese wuds ter you, who gwine ter do it?”

“I've been thinking the matter over, Mammy, and I've
decided that the best thing for you to do is to go back to Tara. I'll give you some money and—”

Mammy drew herself up with all her dignity.

“Ah is free, Miss Scarlett. You kain sen' me nowhar Ah doan wanter go. An' w'en Ah goes back ter Tara, it's gwine be w'en you goes wid me. Ah ain' gwine leave Miss Ellen's chile, an' dar ain' no way in de worl' ter mek me go. An' Ah ain' gwine leave Miss Ellen's gran'chillun fer no trashy step-pa ter bring up, needer. Hyah Ah is and hyah Ah stays!”

“I will not have you staying in my house and being rude to Captain Butler. I am going to marry him and there's no more to be said.”

“Dar is plen'y mo ter be said,” retorted Mammy slowly and into her blurred old eyes there came the light of battle.

“But Ah ain' never thought ter say it ter none of Miss Ellen's blood. But, Miss Scarlett, lissen ter me. You ain' nuthin' but a mule in hawse harness. You kin polish a mule's feets an' shine his hide an' put brass all over his harness an' hitch him ter a fine cah'ige. But he a mule jes' de same. He doan fool nobody. An' you is jes' de same. You got silk dresses an' de mills an' de sto' an' de money, an' you give yo'seff airs lak a fine hawse, but you a mule jes' de same. An' you ain' foolin' nobody, needer. An' dat Butler man, he come of good stock and he all slicked up lak a race hawse, but he a mule in hawse harness, jes' lak you.”