Inferiors, especially darkies." But if she was gentle the darkies

would sit in the kitchen all day, talking endlessly about the good

old days when a house nigger wasn't supposed to do a field hand's

work.

"Love and cherish your sisters. Be kind to the afflicted," said

Ellen. "Show tenderness to those in sorrow and in trouble."

She couldn't love her sisters now. They were simply a dead weight

on her shoulders. And as for cherishing them, wasn't she bathing

them, combing their hair and feeding them, even at the expense of

walking miles every day to find vegetables? Wasn't she learning to

milk the cow, even though her heart was always in her throat when

that fearsome animal shook its horns at her? And as for being

kind, that was a waste of time. If she was overly kind to them,

they'd probably prolong their stay in bed, and she wanted them on

their feet again as soon as possible, so there would be four more

hands to help her.

They were convalescing slowly and lay scrawny and weak in their

bed. While they had been unconscious, the world had changed. The

Yankees had come, the darkies had gone and Mother had died. Here

were three unbelievable happenings and their minds could not take

them in. Sometimes they believed they must still be delirious and

these things had not happened at all. Certainly Scarlett was so

changed she couldn't be real. When she hung over the foot of their

bed and outlined the work she expected them to do when they

recovered, they looked at her as if she were a hobgoblin. It was

beyond their comprehension that they no longer had a hundred slaves

to do the work. It was beyond their comprehension that an O'Hara

lady should do manual labor.

"But, Sister," said Carreen, her sweet childish face blank with

consternation. "I couldn't split kindling! It would ruin my

hands!"

"Look at mine," answered Scarlett with a frightening smile as she

pushed blistered and calloused palms toward her.

"I think you are hateful to talk to Baby and me like this!" cried

Suellen. "I think you are lying and trying to frighten us. If

Mother were only here, she wouldn't let you talk to us like this!

Split kindling, indeed!"

Suellen looked with weak loathing at her older sister, feeling sure

Scarlett said these things just to be mean. Suellen had nearly

died and she had lost her mother and she was lonely and scared and

she wanted to be petted and made much of. Instead, Scarlett looked

over the foot of the bed each day, appraising their improvement

with a hateful new gleam in her slanting green eyes and talked

about making beds, preparing food, carrying water buckets and

splitting kindling. And she looked as if she took a pleasure in

saying such awful things.

Scarlett did take pleasure in it. She bullied the negroes and

harrowed the feelings of her sisters not only because she was too

worried and strained and tired to do otherwise but because it

helped her to forget her own bitterness that everything her mother

had told her about life was wrong.

Nothing her mother had taught her was of any value whatsoever now

and Scarlett's heart was sore and puzzled. It did not occur to her

that Ellen could not have foreseen the collapse of the civilization

in which she raised her daughters, could not have anticipated the

disappearings of the places in society for which she trained them

so well. It did not occur to her that Ellen had looked down a

vista of placid future years, all like the uneventful years of her

own life, when she had taught her to be gentle and gracious,

honorable and kind, modest and truthful. Life treated women well

when they had learned those lessons, said Ellen.

Scarlett thought in despair: "Nothing, no, nothing, she taught me

is of any help to me! What good will kindness do me now? What

value is gentleness? Better that I'd learned to plow or chop

cotton like a darky. Oh, Mother, you were wrong!"

She did not stop to think that Ellen's ordered world was gone and a

brutal world had taken its place, a world wherein every standard,

every value had changed. She only saw, or thought she saw, that

her mother had been wrong, and she changed swiftly to meet this new

world for which she was not prepared.

Only her feeling for Tara had not changed. She never came wearily

home across the fields and saw the sprawling white house that her

heart did not swell with love and the joy of homecoming. She never

looked out of her window at green pastures and red fields and tall

tangled swamp forest that a sense of beauty did not fill her. Her

love for this land with its softly rolling hills of bright-red

soil, this beautiful red earth that was blood colored, garnet,

brick dust, vermilion, which so miraculously grew green bushes

starred with white puffs, was one part of Scarlett which did not

change when all else was changing. Nowhere else in the world was

there land like this.

When she looked at Tara she could understand, in part, why wars

were fought. Rhett was wrong when he said men fought wars for

money. No, they fought for swelling acres, softly furrowed by the

plow, for pastures green with stubby cropped grass, for lazy yellow

rivers and white houses that were cool amid magnolias. These were

the only things worth fighting for, the red earth which was theirs

and would be their sons', the red earth which would bear cotton for

their sons and their sons' sons.

The trampled acres of Tara were all that was left to her, now that

Mother and Ashley were gone, now that Gerald was senile from shock,

and money and darkies and security and position had vanished

overnight. As from another world she remembered a conversation

with her father about the land and wondered how she could have been

so young, so ignorant, as not to understand what he meant when he

said that the land was the one thing in the world worth fighting

for.

"For 'tis the only thing in the world that lasts . . . and to

anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them the land they live on is

like their mother. . . . 'Tis the only thing worth working for,

fighting for, dying for."

Yes, Tara was worth fighting for, and she accepted simply and

without question the fight. No one was going to get Tara away from

her. No one was going to set her and her people adrift on the

charity of relatives. She would hold Tara, if she had to break the

back of every person on it.

CHAPTER XXVI

Scarlett had been at Tara two weeks since her return from Atlanta

when the largest blister on her foot began to fester, swelling

until it was impossible for her to put on her shoe or do more than

hobble about on her heel. Desperation plucked at her when she

looked at the angry sore on her toe. Suppose it should gangrene

like the soldiers' wounds and she should die, far away from a

doctor? Bitter as life was now, she had no desire to leave it.

And who would look after Tara if she should die?

She had hoped when she first came home that Gerald's old spirit

would revive and he would take command, but in these two weeks that

hope had vanished. She knew now that, whether she liked it or not,

she had the plantation and all its people on her two inexperienced

hands, for Gerald still sat quietly, like a man in a dream, so

frighteningly absent from Tara, so gentle. To her pleas for advice

he gave as his only answer: "Do what you think best, Daughter."

Or worse still, "Consult with your mother, Puss."

He never would be any different and now Scarlett realized the truth

and accepted it without emotion--that until he died Gerald would

always be waiting for Ellen, always listening for her. He was in

some dim borderline country where time was standing still and Ellen

was always in the next room. The mainspring of his existence was

taken away when she died and with it had gone his bounding

assurance, his impudence and his restless vitality. Ellen was the

audience before which the blustering drama of Gerald O'Hara had

been played. Now the curtain had been rung down forever, the

footlights dimmed and the audience suddenly vanished, while the

stunned old actor remained on his empty stage, waiting for his

cues.

That morning the house was still, for everyone except Scarlett,

Wade and the three sick girls was in the swamp hunting the sow.

Even Gerald had aroused a little and stumped off across the

furrowed fields, one hand on Pork's arm and a coil of rope in the

other. Suellen and Careen had cried themselves to sleep, as they

did at least twice a day when they thought of Ellen, tears of grief

and weakness oozing down their sunken cheeks. Melanie, who had

been propped up on pillows for the first time that day, lay covered

with a mended sheet between two babies, the downy flaxen head of

one cuddled in her arm, the kinky black head of Dilcey's child held

as gently in the other. Wade sat at the bottom of the bed,

listening to a fairy story.

To Scarlett, the stillness at Tara was unbearable, for it reminded

her too sharply of the deathlike stillness of the desolate country

through which she had passed that long day on her way home from

Atlanta. The cow and the calf had made no sound for hours. There

were no birds twittering outside her window and even the noisy

family of mockers who had lived among the harshly rustling leaves

of the magnolia for generations had no song that day. She had

drawn a low chair close to the open window of her bedroom, looking

out on the front drive, the lawn and the empty green pasture across

the road, and she sat with her skirts well above her knees and her

chin resting on her arms on the window sill. There was a bucket of

well water on the floor beside her and every now and then she

lowered her blistered foot into it, screwing up her face at the

stinging sensation.

Fretting, she dug her chin into her arm. Just when she needed her

strength most, this toe had to fester. Those fools would never

catch the sow. It had taken them a week to capture the pigs, one

by one, and now after two weeks the sow was still at liberty.

Scarlett knew that if she were just there in the swamp with them,

she could tuck up her dress to her knees and take the rope and

lasso the sow before you could say Jack Robinson.

But even after the sow was caught--if she were caught? What then,

after she and her litter were eaten? Life would go on and so would

appetites. Winter was coming and there would be no food, not even

the poor remnants of the vegetables from the neighbors' gardens.

They must have dried peas and sorghum and meal and rice and--and--

oh, so many things. Corn and cotton seed for next spring's

planting, and new clothes too. Where was it all to come from and

how would she pay for it?

She had privately gone through Gerald's pockets and his cash box

and all she could find was stacks of Confederate bonds and three

thousand dollars in Confederate bills. That was about enough to

buy one square meal for them all, she thought ironically, now that

Confederate money was worth almost less than nothing at all. But

if she did have money and could find food, how would she haul it

home to Tara? Why had God let the old horse die? Even that sorry

animal Rhett had stolen would make all the difference in the world

to them. Oh, those fine sleek mules which used to kick up their

heels in the pasture across the road, and the handsome carriage

horses, her little mare, the girls' ponies and Gerald's big

stallion racing about and tearing up the turf-- Oh, for one of

them, even the balkiest mule!

But, no matter--when her foot healed she would walk to Jonesboro.

It would be the longest walk she had ever taken in her life, but

walk it she would. Even if the Yankees had burned the town

completely, she would certainly find someone in the neighborhood

who could tell her where to get food. Wade's pinched face rose up

before her eyes. He didn't like yams, he repeated; wanted a

drumstick and some rice and gravy.

The bright sunlight in the front yard suddenly clouded and the

trees blurred through tears. Scarlett dropped her head on her arms

and struggled not to cry. Crying was so useless now. The only

time crying ever did any good was when there was a man around from

whom you wished favors. As she crouched there, squeezing her eyes

tightly to keep back the tears, she was startled by the sound of

trotting hooves. But she did not raise her head. She had imagined

that sound too often in the nights and days of these last two

weeks, just as she had imagined she heard the rustle of Ellen's

skirts. Her heart hammered, as it always did at such moments,

before she told herself sternly: "Don't be a fool."

But the hooves slowed down in a startlingly natural way to the

rhythm of a walk and there was the measured scrunch-scrunch on the

gravel. It was a horse--the Tarletons, the Fontaines! She looked

up quickly. It was a Yankee cavalryman.

Automatically, she dodged behind the curtain and peered fascinated

at him through the dim folds of the cloth, so startled that the

breath went out of her lungs with a gasp.

He sat slouched in the saddle, a thick, rough-looking man with an

unkempt black beard straggling over his unbuttoned blue jacket.

Little close-set eyes, squinting in the sun glare, calmly surveyed

the house from beneath the visor of his tight blue cap. As he

slowly dismounted and tossed the bridle reins over the hitching

post, Scarlett's breath came back to her as suddenly and painfully

as after a blow in the stomach. A Yankee, a Yankee with a long

pistol on his hip! And she was alone in the house with three sick

girls and the babies!

As he lounged up the walk, hand on holster, beady little eyes

glancing to right and left, a kaleidoscope of jumbled pictures spun