She wondered occasionally if these meetings were not more than accidental. They became more and more numerous as the weeks went by and as the tension in town heightened over negro outrages. But why did he seek her out, now of all times when she looked her worst? Certainly he had no designs upon her if he had ever had any, and she was beginning to doubt even this. It had been months since he made any joking references to their distressing scene at the Yankee jail. He never mentioned Ashley and her love for him, or made any coarse and ill-bred remarks about “coveting her.” She thought it best to let sleeping dogs lie, so she did not ask for an explanation of their frequent meetings. And finally she decided that, because he had little to do besides gamble and had few enough nice friends in Atlanta, he sought her out solely for companionship’s sake.
Whatever his reason might be, she found his company most welcome. He listened to her moans about lost customers and bad debts, the swindling ways of Mr. Johnson and the incompetency of Hugh. He applauded her triumphs, where Frank merely smiled indulgently and Pitty said “Dear me!” in a dazed manner. She was sure that rich Yankees and Carpetbaggers intimately, but he always denied being helpful. She knew him for what he was and she never trusted him, but her spirits always rose with pleasure at the sight of him riding around the curve of a shady road on his big black horse. When he climbed into the buggy and took the reins from her and threw her some impertinent remark, she felt young and gay and attractive again, for an her worries and her increasing bulk. She could talk to him about almost everything, with no care for concealing her motives or her real opinions and she never ran out of things to say as she did with Frank—or even with Ashley, if she must be honest with herself. But of course, in all her conversations with Ashley there were so many things which could not be said, for honor’s sake, that the sheer force of them inhibited other remarks. It was comforting to have a friend like Rhett, now that for some unaccountable reason he had decided to be on good behavior with her. Very comforting, for she had so few friends these days.
“Rhett,” she asked stormily, shortly after Uncle Peter’s ultimatum, “why do folks in this town treat me so scurvily and talk about me so? It’s a toss-up who they talk worst about, me or the Carpetbaggers! I’ve minded my own business and haven’t done anything wrong and—”
“If you haven’t done anything wrong, it’s because you haven’t had the opportunity, and perhaps they dimly realize it.”
“Oh, do be serious! They make me so mad. All I’ve done is try to make a little money and—”
“All you’ve done is to be different from other women and you’ve made a little success at it. As I’ve told you before, that is the one unforgivable sin in any society. Be different and be damned! Scarlett, the mere fact that you’ve made a success of your mill is an insult to every man who hasn’t succeeded. Remember, a well-bred female’s place is in the home and she should know nothing about this busy, brutal world.”
“But if I had stayed in my home, I wouldn’t have had any home left to stay in.”
“The inference is that you should have starved genteelly and with pride.”
“Oh, fiddle-dee-dee! But look at Mrs. Merriwether. She’s selling pies to Yankees and that’s worse than running a sawmill, and Mrs. Elsing takes in sewing and keeps boarders, and Fanny paints awful-looking china things that nobody wants and everybody buys to help her and—”
“But you miss the point, my pet. They aren’t successful and so they aren’t affronting the hot Southern pride of their men folks. The men can still say, ‘Poor sweet sillies, how hard they try! Well, I’ll let them think they’re helping.’ And besides, the ladies you mentioned don’t enjoy having to work. They let it be known that they are only doing it until some man conies along to relieve them of their unwomanly burdens. And so everybody feels sorry for them. But obviously you do like to work and obviously you aren’t going to let any man tend to your business for you, and so no one can feel sorry for you. And Atlanta is never going to forgive you for that. It’s so pleasant to feel sorry for people.”
“I wish you’d be serious, sometimes.”
“Did you ever hear the Oriental proverb: The dogs bark but the caravan passes on?” Let them bark, Scarlett. I fear nothing will stop your caravan.”
“But why should they mind my making a little money?”
“You can’t have everything, Scarlett. You can either make money in your present unladylike manner and meet cold shoulders everywhere you go, or you can be poor and genteel and have lots of friends. You’ve made your choice.”
“I won’t be poor,” she said swiftly. “But—it is the right choice, isn’t it?”
“If it’s money you want most.”
“Yes, I want money more than anything else in the world.”
“Then you’ve made the only choice. But there’s a penalty attached, as there is to most things you want. It’s loneliness.”
That silenced her for a moment. It was true. When she stopped to think about it, she was a little lonely—lonely for feminine companionship. During the war years she had had Ellen to visit when she felt blue. And since Ellen’s death, there had always been Melanie, though she and Melanie had nothing in common except the hard work at Tara. Now there was no one, for Aunt Pitty had no conception of life beyond her small round of gossip.
“I think—I think,” she began hesitantly, “that I’ve always been lonely where women were concerned. It isn’t just my working that makes Atlanta ladies dislike me. They just don’t like me anyway. No woman ever really liked me, except Mother. Even my sisters. I don’t know why, but even before the war, even before I married Charlie, ladies didn’t seem to approve of anything I did—”
“You forget Mrs. Wilkes,” said Rhett and his eyes gleamed maliciously. “She has always approved of you up to the hilt. I daresay she’d approve of anything you did, short of murder.”
Scarlett thought grimly: “She’s even approved of murder,” and she laughed contemptuously.
“Oh, Melly!” she said, and then, ruefully: “It’s certainly not to my credit that Melly is the only woman who approves of me, for she hasn’t the sense of a guinea hen. If she had any sense—” She stopped in some confusion.
“If she had any sense, she’d realize a few things and she couldn’t approve,” Rhett finished. “Well, you know more about that than I do, of course.”
“Oh, damn your memory and your bad manners!”
“I’ll pass over your unjustified rudeness with the silence it deserves and return to our former subject. Make up your mind to this. If you are different; you are isolated, not only from people of your own age but from those of your parents’ generation and from your children’s generation too. They’ll never understand you and they’ll be shocked no matter what you do. But your grandparents would probably be proud of you and say: ‘There’s a chip off the old block,’ and your grandchildren will sigh enviously and say: ‘What an old rip Grandma must have been!’ and they’ll try to be like you.”
Scarlett laughed with amusement.
“Sometimes you do hit on the truth! Now there was my Grandma Robillard. Mammy used to hold her over my head whenever I was naughty. Grandma was as cold as an icicle and strict about her manners and everybody else’s manners, but she married three times and had any number of duels fought over her and she wore rouge and the most shockingly low-cut dresses and no—well, er—not much under her dresses.”
“And you admired her tremendously, for all that you tried to be like your mother! I had a grandfather on the Butler side who was a pirate.”
“Not really! A walk-the-plank kind?”
“I daresay he made people walk the plank if there was any money to be made that way. At any rate, he made enough money to leave my father quite wealthy. But the family always referred to him carefully as a ‘sea captain.’ He was killed in a saloon brawl long before I was born. His death was, needless to say, a great relief to his children, for the old gentleman was drunk most of the time and when in his cups was apt to forget that he was a retired sea captain and give reminiscences that curled his children’s hair. However, I admired him and tried to copy him far more than I ever did my father, for Father is an amiable gentleman full of honorable habits and pious saws—so you see how it goes. I’m sure your children won’t approve of you, Scarlett, any more than Mrs. Merriwether and Mrs. Elsing and their broods approve of you now. Your children will probably be soft, prissy creatures, as the children of hard-bitten characters usually are. And to make them worse, you, like every other mother, are probably determined that they shall never know the hardships you’ve known. And that’s all wrong. Hardships make or break people. So you’ll have to wait for approval from your grandchildren.”
“I wonder what our grandchildren will be like!”
“Are you suggesting by that ‘our’ that you and I will have mutual grandchildren? Fie, Mrs. Kennedy!”
Scarlett, suddenly conscious of her error of speech, went red. It was more than his joking words that shamed her, for she was suddenly aware again of her thickening body. In no way had either of them ever hinted at her condition and she had always kept the lap robe high under her armpits when with him, even on warm days, comforting herself in the usual feminine manner with the belief that she did not show at all when thus covered, and she was suddenly sick with quick rage at her own condition and shame that he should know.
“You get out of this buggy, you dirty-minded varmint,” she said, her voice shaking.
“I’ll do nothing of the kind,” he returned calmly. “It’ll be dark before you get home and there’s a new colony of darkies living in tents and shanties near the next spring, mean niggers I’ve been told, and I see no reason why you should give the impulsive Ku Klux a cause for putting on their nightshirts and riding abroad this evening.”
“Get out!” she cried, tugging at the reins and suddenly nausea overwhelmed her. He stopped the horse quickly, passed her two clean handkerchiefs and held her head over the side of the buggy with some skill. The afternoon sun, slanting low through the newly leaved trees, spun sickeningly for a few moments in a swirl of gold and green. When the spell had passed, she put her head in her hands and cried from sheer mortification. Not only had she vomited before a man—in itself as horrible a contretemps as could overtake a woman—but by doing so, the humiliating fact of her pregnancy must now be evident. She felt that she could never look him in the face again. To have this happen with him, of all people, with Rhett who had no respect for women! She cried, expecting some coarse and jocular remark from him which she would never be able to forget.
“Don’t be a fool,” he said quietly. “And you are a fool, if you are crying for shame. Come, Scarlett, don’t be a child. Surely you must know that, not being blind, I knew you were pregnant.”
She said “Oh” in a stunned voice and tightened her fingers over her crimson face. The word itself horrified her. Frank always referred to her pregnancy embarrassedly as “your condition,” Gerald had been won’t to say delicately “in the family way,” when he had to mention such matters, and ladies genteelly referred to pregnancy as being “in a fix.”
“You are a child if you thought I didn’t know, for all your smothering yourself under that hot lap robe. Of course, I knew. Why else do you think I’ve been—”
He stopped suddenly and a silence fell between them. He picked up the reins and clucked to the horse. He went on talking quietly and as his drawl fell pleasantly on her ears, some of the color faded from her down-tucked face.
“I didn’t think you could be so shocked, Scarlett. I thought you were a sensible person and I’m disappointed. Can it be possible that modesty still lingers in your breast? I’m afraid I’m not a gentleman to have mentioned the matter. And I know I’m not a gentleman, in view of the fact that pregnant women do not embarrass me as they should. I find it possible to treat them as normal creatures and not look at the ground or the sky or anywhere else in the universe except their waist lines—and then cast at them those furtive glances I’ve always thought the height of indecency. Why should I? It’s a perfectly normal state. The Europeans are far more sensible than we are. They compliment expectant mothers upon their expectations. While I wouldn’t advise going that far, still it’s more sensible than our way of trying to ignore it. It’s a normal state and women should be proud of it, instead of hiding behind closed doors as if they’d committed a crime.”
“Proud!” she cried in a strangled voice. “Proud—ugh!”
“Aren’t you proud to be having a child?”
“Oh dear God, no! I—I hate babies!”
“You mean—Frank’s baby.”
“No—anybody’s baby.”
For a moment she went sick again at this new error of speech, but his voice went on as easily as though he had not marked it.
“Then we’re different. I like babies.”
“You like them?” she cried, looking up, so startled at the statement that she forgot her embarrassment “What a liar you are!”
“I like babies and I like little children, till they begin to grow up and acquire adult habits of thought and adult abilities to lie and cheat and be dirty. That can’t be news to you. You know I like Wade Hampton a lot, for all that he isn’t the boy he ought to be.”
That was true, thought Scarlett, suddenly marveling. He did seem to enjoy playing with Wade and often brought him presents.
“Now that we’ve brought this dreadful subject into the light and you admit that you expect a baby some time in the not too distant future, I’ll say something I’ve been wanting to say for weeks—two things. The first is that it’s dangerous for you to drive alone. You know it. You’ve been told it often enough. If you don’t care personally whether or not you are raped, you might consider the consequences. Because of your obstinacy, you may get yourself into a situation where your gallant fellow townsmen will be forced to avenge you by stringing up a few darkies. And that will bring the Yankees down on them and someone will probably get hanged. Has it ever occurred to you that perhaps one of the reasons the ladies do not like you is that your conduct may cause the neck-stretching of their sons and husbands? And furthermore, if the Ku Klux handles many more negroes, the Yankees are going to tighten up on Atlanta in a way that will make Sherman’s conduct look angelic. I know what I’m talking about, for I’m hand in glove with the Yankees. Shameful to state, they treat me as one of them and I hear them talk openly. They mean to stamp out the Ku Klux if it means burning the whole town again and hanging every male over ten. That would hurt you, Scarlett. You might lose money. And there’s no telling where a prairie fire will stop, once it gets started. Confiscation of property, higher taxes, fines for suspected women—I’ve heard them all suggested. The Ku Klux—”
