Gone with the Wind

“They haven’t an idea what is really happening to me or to themselves or to the South. They still think, in spite of everything, that nothing really dreadful can happen to any of them because they are who they are, O’Haras, Wilkeses, Hamiltons. Even the darkies feel that way. Oh, they’re all fools! They’ll never realize! They’ll go right on thinking and living as they always have, and nothing will change them. Melly can dress in rags and pick cotton and even help me murder a man but it doesn’t change her. She’s still the shy well-bred Mrs. Wilkes, the perfect lady! And Ashley can see death and war and be wounded and lie in jail and come home to less than nothing and still be the same gentleman he was when he had all Twelve Oaks behind him. Will is different. He knows how things really are but then Will never had anything much to lose. And as for Suellen and Carreen-they think all this is just a temporary matter. They don’t change to meet changed conditions because they think it’ll all be over soon. They think God is going to work a miracle especially for their benefit. But He won’t. The only miracle that’s going to be worked around here is the one I’m going to work on Rhett Butler… They won’t change. Maybe they can’t change. I’m the only one who’s changed-and I wouldn’t have changed if I could have helped it.”

Mammy finally turned the men out of the dining room and closed the door, so the fitting could begin. Pork helped Gerald upstairs to bed and Ashley and Will were left alone in the lamplight in the front hall. They were silent for a while and Will chewed his tobacco like a placid ruminant animal. But his mild face was far from placid.

“This goin’ to Atlanta,” he said at last in a slow voice, “I don’t like it. Not one bit.”

Ashley looked at Will quickly and then looked away, saying nothing but wondering if Will had the same awful suspicion which was haunting him. But that was impossible. Will didn’t know what had taken place in the orchard that afternoon and how it had driven Scarlett to desperation. Will couldn’t have noticed Mammy’s face when Rhett Butler’s name was mentioned and, besides, Will didn’t know about Rhett’s money or his foul reputation. At least, Ashley did not think he could know these things, but since coming back to Tara he had realized that Will, like Mammy, seemed to know things without being told, to sense them before they happened. There was something ominous in the air, exactly what Ashley did not know, but he was powerless to save Scarlett from it. She had not met his eyes once that evening and the hard bright gaiety with which she had treated him was frightening. The suspicions which tore at him were too terrible to be put into words. He did not have the right to insult her by asking her if they were true. He clenched his fists. He had no rights at all where she was concerned; this afternoon he had forfeited them all, forever. He could not help her. No one could help her. But when he thought of Mammy and the look of grim determination she wore as she cut into the velvet curtains, he was cheered a little. Mammy would take care of Scarlett whether Scarlett wished it or not.

“I have caused all this,” he thought despairingly. “I have driven her to this.”

He remembered the way she had squared her shoulders when she turned away from him that afternoon, remembered the stubborn lift of her head. His heart went out to her, torn with his own helplessness, wrenched with admiration. He knew she had no such word in her vocabulary as gallantry, knew she would have stared blankly if he had told her she was the most gallant soul he had ever known. He knew she would not understand how many truly fine things he ascribed to her when he thought of her as gallant. He knew that she took life as it came, opposed her tough-fibered mind to whatever obstacles there might be, fought on with a determination that would not recognize defeat, and kept on fighting even when she saw defeat was inevitable.

But, for four years, he had seen others who had refused to recognize defeat, men who rode gaily into sure disaster because they were gallant. And they had been defeated, just the same.

He thought as he stared at Will in the shadowy hall that he had never known such gallantry as the gallantry of Scarlett O’Hara going forth to conquer the world in her mother’s velvet curtains and the tail feathers of a rooster.

Chapter XXXIII