Gone with the Wind (102 page)

“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 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 onto 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 outspoken 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.

She could never respect a man who let her run over him and the timid, hesitant attitude he displayed in any
unpleasant situation, with her or with others, irritated her unbearably. But she could have overlooked these things and even been happy, now that some of her money problems were being solved, except for her constantly renewed exasperation growing out of the many incidents which showed that Frank was neither a good business man nor did he want her to be a good business man.

As she expected, he had refused to collect the unpaid bills until she prodded him into it, and then he had done it apologetically and half heartedly. That experience was the final evidence she needed to show her that the Kennedy family would never have more than a bare living, unless she personally made the money she was determined to have. She knew now that Frank would be contented to dawdle along with his dirty little store for the rest of his life. He didn't seem to realize what a slender fingerhold they had on security and how important it was to make more money in these troublous times when money was the only protection against fresh calamities.

Frank might have been a successful business man in the easy days before the war but he was so annoyingly old-fashioned, she thought, and so stubborn about wanting to do things in the old ways, when the old ways and the old days were gone. He was utterly lacking in the aggressiveness needed in these new bitter times. Well, she had the aggressiveness and she intended to use it, whether Frank liked it or not. They needed money and she was making money and it was hard work. The very least Frank could do, in her opinion, was not to interfere with her plans which were getting results.

With her inexperience, operating the new mill was no
easy job and competition was keener now than it had been at first, so she was usually tired and worried and cross when she came home at nights. And when Frank would cough apologetically and say: “Sugar, I wouldn't do this,” or “I wouldn't do that, Sugar, if I were you,” it was all she could do to restrain herself from flying into a rage, and frequently she did not restrain herself. If he didn't have the gumption to get out and make some money, why was he always finding fault with her? And the things he nagged her about were so silly! What difference did it make in times like these if she was being unwomanly? Especially when her unwomanly sawmill was bringing in money they needed so badly, she and the family and Tara, and Frank too.

Frank wanted rest and quiet. The war in which he had served so conscientiously had wrecked his health, cost him his fortune and made him an old man. He regretted none of these things and after four years of war, all he asked of life was peace and kindliness, loving faces about him and the approval of friends. He soon found that domestic peace had its price, and that price was letting Scarlett have her own way, no matter what she might wish to do. So, because he was tired, he bought peace at her own terms. Sometimes, he thought it was worth it to have her smiling when she opened the front door in the cold twilights, kissing him on the ear or the nose or some other inappropriate place, to feel her head snuggling drowsily on his shoulder at night under warm quilts. Home life could be so pleasant when Scarlett was having her own way. But the peace he gained was hollow, only an outward semblance, for he had purchased it at the cost of everything he held to be right in married life.

“A woman ought to pay more attention to her home and her family and not be gadding about like a man,” he thought. “Now, if she just had a baby—”

He smiled when he thought of a baby and he thought of a baby very often. Scarlett had been most outspoken about not wanting a child, but then babies seldom waited to be invited. Frank knew that many women said they didn't want babies but that was all foolishness and fear. If Scarlett had a baby, she would love it and be content to stay home and tend it like other women. Then she would be forced to sell the mill and his problems would be ended. All women needed babies to make them completely happy and Frank knew that Scarlett was not happy. Ignorant as he was of women, he was not so blind that he could not see she was unhappy at times.

Sometimes he awoke at night and heard the soft sound of tears muffled in the pillow. The first time he had waked to feel the bed shaking with her sobbing, he had questioned, in alarm: “Sugar, what is it?” and had been rebuked by a passionate cry: “Oh, let me alone!”

Yes, a baby would make her happy and would take her mind off things she had no business fooling with. Sometimes Frank sighed, thinking he had caught a tropic bird, all flame and jewel color, when a wren would have served him just as well. In fact, much better.

I
T WAS ON A WILD WET NIGHT IN
A
PRIL
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.