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 disappearing 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 26
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 would 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 would never 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.