ELLEN O’HARA was thirty-two years old, and, according to the standards of her day, she was amiddle-aged woman, one who had borne six children and buried three. She was a tall woman,standing a head higher than her fiery little husband, but she moved with such quiet grace in herswaying hoops that the height attracted no attention to itself. Her neck, rising from the black taffetasheath of her basque, was creamy-skinned, rounded and slender, and it seemed always tiltedslightly backward by the weight of her luxuriant hair in its net at the back of her head. From herFrench mother, whose parents had fled Haiti in the Revolution of 1791, had come her slanting darkeyes, shadowed by inky lashes, and her black hair; and from her father, a soldier of Napoleon, she had her long straight nose and her square-cut jaw that was softened by the gentle curving of hercheeks. But only from life could Ellen’s face have acquired its look of pride that had nohaughtiness, its graciousness, its melancholy and its utter lack of humor.
She would have been a strikingly beautiful woman had there been any glow in her eyes, anyresponsive warmth in her smile or any spontaneity in her voice that fell with gentle melody on theears of her family and her servants. She spoke in the soft slurring voice of the coastal Georgian,liquid of vowels, kind to consonants and with the barest trace of French accent. It was a voicenever raised in command to a servant or reproof to a child but a voice that was obeyed instantly atTara, where her husband’s blustering and roaring were quietly disregarded.
As far back as Scarlett could remember, her mother had always been the same, her voice softand sweet whether in praising or in reproving, her manner efficient and unruffled despite the dailyemergencies of Gerald’s turbulent household, her spirit always calm and her back unbowed, evenin the deaths of her three baby sons. Scarlett had never seen her mother’s back touch the back ofany chair on which she sat. Nor had she ever seen her sit down without a bit of needlework in herhands, except at mealtime, while attending the sick or while working at the bookkeeping of theplantation. It was delicate embroidery if company were present, but at other times her hands wereoccupied with Gerald’s ruffled shirts, the girls’ dresses or garments for the slaves. Scarlett couldnot imagine her mother’s hands without her gold thimble or her rustling figure unaccompanied bythe small negro girl whose sole function in life was to remove basting threads and carry therosewood sewing box from room to room, as Ellen moved about the house superintending thecooking, the cleaning and the wholesale clothes-making for the plantation.
She had never seen her mother stirred from her austere placidity, nor her personal appointmentsanything but perfect, no matter what the hour of day or night. When Ellen was dressing for a ballor for guests or even to go to Jonesboro for Court Day, it frequently required two hours, two maidsand Mammy to turn her out to her own satisfaction; but her swift toilets in times of emergencywere amazing.
Scarlett, whose room lay across the hall from her mother’s, knew from babyhood the soft soundof scurrying bare black feet on the hardwood floor in the hours of dawn, the urgent tappings on hermother’s door, and the muffled, frightened negro voices that whispered of sickness and birth anddeath in the long row of whitewashed cabins in the quarters. As a child, she often had crept to thedoor and, peeping through the tiniest crack, had seen Ellen emerge from the dark room, whereGerald’s snores were rhythmic and untroubled, into the flickering light of an upheld candle, hermedicine case under her arm, her hair smoothed neatly place, and no button on her basqueunlooped.
It had always been so soothing to Scarlett to hear her mother whisper, firmly butcompassionately, as she tiptoed down the hall: “Hush, not so loudly. You will wake Mr. O’Hara.
They are not sick enough to die.
Yes, it was good to creep back into bed and know that Ellen was abroad in the night andeverything was right.
In the mornings, after all-night sessions at births and deaths, when old Dr. Fontaine and youngDr. Fontaine were both out on calls and could not be found to help her, Ellen presided at the breakfast table as usual, her dark eyes circled with weariness but her voice and manner revealingnone of the strain. There was a steely quality under her stately gentleness that awed the wholehousehold, Gerald as well as the girls, though he would have died rather than admit it.
Sometimes when Scarlett tiptoed at night to kiss her tall mother’s cheek, she looked up at themouth with its too short, too tender upper lip, a mouth too easily hurt by the world, and wonderedif it had ever curved in silly girlish giggling or whispered secrets through long nights to intimategirl friends. But no, that wasn’t possible. Mother had always been just as she was, a pillar ofstrength, a fount of wisdom, the one person who knew the answers to everything.
But Scarlett wrong, for, years before, Ellen Robillard of Savannah had giggled as inexplicablyasany(was) fifteen-year-old in that charming coastal city and whispered the long nightsthrough with friends, exchanging confidences, telling all secrets but one. That was the year whenGerald O’Hara, twenty-eight years older than she, came into her life—the year, too, when youthand her black-eyed cousin, Philippe Robillard, went out of it. For when Philippe, with his snappingeyes and his wild ways, left Savannah forever, he took with him the glow that was in Ellen’s heartand left for the bandy-legged little Irishman who married her only a gentle shell.
But that was enough for Gerald, overwhelmed at his unbelievable luck in actually marrying her.
And if anything was gone from her, he never missed it. Shrewd man that he was, he knew that itwas no less than a miracle that he, an Irishman with nothing of family and wealth to recommendhim, should win the daughter of one of the wealthiest and proudest families on the Coast. ForGerald was a self-made man.
Gerald had come to America from Ireland when he was twenty-one. He had come hastily, asmany a better and worse Irishman before and since, with the clothes he had on his back, twoshillings above his passage money and a price on his head that he felt was larger than his misdeedwarranted. There was no Orangeman this side of hell worth a hundred pounds to the Britishgovernment or to the devil himself; but if the government felt so strongly about the death of anEnglish absentee landlord’s rent agent, it was time for Gerald O’Hara to be leaving and leavingsuddenly. True, he had called the rent agent “a bastard of an Orangeman,” but that, according toGerald’s way of looking at it, did not give the man any right to insult him by whistling the openingbars of “The Boyne Water.
The Battle of the Boyne had been fought more than a hundred years before, but, to the O’Harasand their neighbors, it might have been yesterday when their hopes and their dreams, as well astheir lands and wealth, went off in the same cloud of dust that enveloped a frightened and fleeingStuart prince, leaving William of Orange and his hated troops with their orange cockades to cutdown the Irish adherents of the Stuarts.
For this and other reasons, Gerald’s family was not inclined to view the fatal outcome of thisquarrel as anything very serious, except for the fact that it was charged with serious consequences.
For years, the O’Haras had been in bad odor with the English constabulary on account of suspectedactivities against the government, and Gerald was not the first O’Hara to take his foot in his handand quit Ireland between dawn and morning. His two oldest brothers, James and Andrew, he hardlyremembered, save as close-lipped youths who came and went at odd hours of the night on mysterious errands or disappeared for weeks at a time, to their mother’s gnawing anxiety. They hadcome to America years before, after the discovery of a small arsenal of rifles buried under theO’Hara pigsty. Now they were successful merchants in Savannah, “though the dear God aloneknows where that may be,” as their mother always interpolated when mentioning the two oldest ofher male brood, and it was to them that young Gerald was sent.
He left home with his mother’s hasty kiss on his cheek and her fervent Catholic blessing in hisears, and his father’s parting admonition, “Remember who ye are and don’t be taking nothing offno man.” His five tall brothers gave him good-by with admiring but slightly patronizing smiles, forGerald was the baby and the little one of a brawny family.
His five brothers and their father stood six feet and over and broad in proportion, but littleGerald, at twenty-one, knew that five feet four and a half inches was as much as the Lord in Hiswisdom was going to allow him. It was like Gerald that he never wasted regrets on his lack ofheight and never found it an obstacle to his acquisition of anything he wanted. Rather, it wasGerald’s compact smallness that made him what he was, for he had learned early that little peoplemust be hardy to survive among large ones. And Gerald was hardy.
His tall brothers were a grim, quiet lot, in whom the family tradition of past glories, lost forever,rankled in unspoken hate and crackled out in bitter humor. Had Gerald been brawny, he wouldhave gone the way of the other O’Haras and moved quietly and darkly among the rebels againstthe government But Gerald was “loud-mouthed and bullheaded,” as his mother fondly phrased it,hair trigger of temper, quick with his fists and possessed of a chip on his shoulder so large as to bealmost visible to the naked eye. He swaggered among the tall O’Haras like a strutting bantam in abarnyard of giant Cochin roosters, and they loved him, baited him affectionately to hear him roarand hammered on him with their large fists no more than was necessary to keep a baby brother inhis proper place.
If the educational equipment which Gerald brought to America was scant, he did not even knowit. Nor would he have cared if he had been told. His mother had taught him to read and to write aclear hand. He was adept at ciphering. And there his book knowledge stopped. The only Latin heknew was the responses of the Mass and the only history the manifold wrongs of Ireland. He knewno poetry save that of Moore and no music except the songs of Ireland that had come downthrough the years. While he entertained the liveliest respect for those who had more book learningthan he, he never felt his own lack. And what need had he of these things in a new country wherethe most ignorant of bogtrotters had made great fortunes? in this country which asked only that aman be strong and unafraid of work
Nor did James and Andrew, who took him into their store in Savannah, regret his lack ofeducation. His clear hand, his accurate figures and his shrewd ability in bargaining won theirrespect, where a knowledge of literature and a fine appreciation of music, had young Gerald possessedthem, would have moved them to snorts of contempt. America, in the early years of thecentury, had been kind to the Irish. James and Andrew, who had begun by hauling goods incovered wagons from Savannah to Georgia’s inland towns, had prospered into a store of their own,and Gerald prospered with them.
He liked the South, and he soon became, in his own opinion, a Southerner. There was much about the South—and Southerners—that he would never comprehend; but, with thewholeheartedness that was his nature, he adopted its ideas and customs, as he understood them, forhis own—poker and horse racing, red-hot politics and the code duello, States’ Rights anddamnation to all Yankees, slavery and King Cotton, contempt for white trash and exaggeratedcourtesy to women. He even learned to chew tobacco. There was no need for him to acquire a goodhead for whisky, he had been born with one.
But Gerald remained Gerald. His habits of living and his ideas changed, but his manners hewould not change, even had he been able to change them. He admired the drawling elegance of thewealthy rice and cotton planters, who rode into Savannah from their moss-hung kingdoms,mounted on thoroughbred horses and followed by the carriages of their equally elegant ladies andthe wagons of their slaves. But Gerald could never attain elegance. Their lazy, blurred voices fellpleasantly on his ears, but his own brisk brogue clung to his tongue. He liked the casual grace withwhich they conducted affairs of importance, risking a fortune, a plantation or a slave on the turn ofa card and writing off their losses with careless good humor and no more ado than when theyscattered pennies to pickaninnies. But Gerald had known poverty, and he could never learn to losemoney with good humor or good grace. They were a pleasant race, these coastal Georgians, withtheir soft-voiced, quick rages and their charming inconsistencies, and Gerald liked them. But therewas a brisk and restless vitality about the young Irishman, fresh from a country where winds blewwet and chill, where misty swamps held no fevers, that set him apart from these indolent gentlefolkof semi-tropical weather and malarial marshes.
From them he learned what he found useful, and the rest he dismissed. He found poker the mostuseful of all Southern customs, poker and a steady head for whisky; and it was his natural aptitudefor cards and amber liquor that brought to Gerald two of his three most prized possessions, hisvalet and his plantation. The other was his wife, and he could only attribute her to the mysteriouskindness of God.
The, valet. Pork by name, shining black, dignified and trained in all the arts of sartorialelegance, was the result of an all-night poker game with a planter from St. Simons Island, whosecourage in a bluff equaled Gerald’s but whose head for New Orleans rum did not. Though Pork’sformer owner later offered to buy him back at twice his value, Gerald obstinately refused, for thepossession of his first slave, and that slave the “best damn valet on the Coast,” was the first stepupward toward his heart’s desire, Gerald wanted to be a slave owner and a landed gentleman.
His mind was made up that he was not going to spend all of his days, like Tames and Andrew, inbargaining, or all his nights, by candlelight, over long columns of figures. He felt keenly, as hisbrothers did not, the social stigma attached to those “in trade.” Gerald wanted to be a planter. Withthe deep hunger of an Irishman who has been a tenant on the lands his people once had owned andhunted, he wanted to see his own acres stretching green before his eyes. With a ruthless singlenessof purpose, he desired his own house, his own plantation, his own horse, his own slaves. And herein this new country, safe from the twin perils of the land he had left—taxation that ate up crops andbarns and the ever-present threat of sudden confiscation—he intended to have them. But havingthat ambition and bringing it to realization were two different matters, he discovered as time wentby. Coastal Georgia was too firmly held by an entrenched aristocracy for him ever to hope to winthe place he intended to have.
Then the hand of Fate and a hand of poker combined to give him the plantation which heafterwards called Tara, and at the same time moved him out of the Coast into the upland country ofnorth Georgia.
It was in a saloon in Savannah, on a hot night in spring, when the chance conversation of astranger sitting near by made Gerald prick up his ears. The stranger, a native of Savannah, had justreturned after twelve years in the inland country. He had been one of the winners in the land lotteryconducted by the State to divide up the vast area in middle Georgia, ceded by the Indians the yearbefore Gerald came to America. He had gone up there and established a plantation; but, now thehouse had burned down, he was tired of the “accursed place” and would be most happy to get it offhis hands.
Gerald, his mind never free of the thought of owning a plantation of his own, arranged anintroduction, and his interest grew as the stranger told how the northern section of the state wasfilling up with newcomers from the Carolinas and Virginia. Gerald had lived in Savannah longenough to acquire a viewpoint of the Coast—that all of the rest of the state was backwoods, withan Indian lurking in every thicket. In transacting business for O’Hara Brothers, he had visitedAugusta, a hundred miles up the Savannah River, and he had traveled inland far enough to visit theold towns westward from that city. He knew that section to be as well settled as the Coast, but fromthe stranger’s description, his plantation was more than two hundred and fifty miles inland fromSavannah to the north and west, and not many miles south of the Chattahoochee River. Geraldknew that northward beyond that stream the land was still held by the Cherokees, so it was withamazement that he heard the stranger jeer at suggestions of trouble with the Indians and narratehow thriving towns were growing up and plantations prospering in the new country.
An hour later when the conversation began to lag, Gerald, with a guile that belied the wideinnocence of his bright blue eyes, proposed a game. As the night wore on and the drinks wentround, there came a time when all the others in the game laid down their hands and Gerald and thestranger were battling alone. The stranger shoved in all his chips and followed with the deed to hisplantation. Gerald shoved in all his chips and laid on top of them his wallet. If the money itcontained happened to belong to the firm of O’Hara Brothers, Gerald’s conscience was notsufficiently troubled to confess it before Mass the following morning. He knew what he wanted,and when Gerald wanted something he gained it by taking the most direct route. Moreover, suchwas his faith in his destiny and four deuces that he never for a moment wondered just how themoney would be paid back should a higher hand be laid down across the table.
It’s no bargain you’re getting and I am glad not to have to pay more taxes on the place,” sighedthe possessor of an “ace full,” as he called for pen and ink. “The big house burned a year ago andthe fields are growing up in brush and seedling pine. But it’s yours.
Never mix cards and whisky unless you were weaned on Irish poteen,” Gerald told Porkgravely the same evening, as Pork assisted him to bed. And the valet, who had begun to attempt abrogue out of admiration for his new master, made requisite answer in a combination of Geecheeand County Meath that would have puzzled anyone except those two alone.
The muddy Flint River, running silently between walls of pine and water oak covered withtangled vines, wrapped about Gerald’s new land like a curving arm and embraced it on two sides.
To Gerald, standing on the small knoll where the house had been, this tall barrier of green was asvisible and pleasing an evidence of ownership as though it were a fence that he himself had built tomark his own. He stood on the blackened foundation stones of the burned building, looked downthe long avenue of trees leading toward the road and swore lustily, with a joy too deep for thankfulprayer. These twin lines of somber trees were his, his the abandoned lawn, waist high in weeds underwhite-starred young magnolia trees. The uncultivated fields, studded with tiny pines andunderbrush, that stretched their rolling red-clay surface away into the distance on four sidesbelonged to Gerald O’Hara—were all his because he had an unbefuddled Irish head and thecourage to stake everything on a hand of cards.
Gerald closed his eyes and, in the stillness of the unworked acres, he felt that he had comehome. Here under his feet would rise a house of whitewashed brick. Across the road would be newrail fences, inclosing fat cattle and blooded horses, and the red earth that rolled down the hillside tothe rich river bottom land would gleam white as eiderdown in the sun—cotton; acres and acres ofcotton! The fortunes of the O’Haras would rise again.
With his own small stake, what he could borrow from his unenthusiastic brothers and a neat sumfrom mortgaging the land, Gerald bought his first field hands and came to Tara to live in bachelorsolitude in the four-room overseer’s house, till such a time as the white walls of Tara should rise.
He cleared the fields and planted cotton and borrowed more money from James and Andrew tobuy more slaves. The O’Haras were a clannish tribe, clinging to one another in prosperity as wellas in adversity, not for any overweening family affection but because they had learned throughgrim years that to survive a family must present an unbroken front to the world. They lent Geraldthe money and, in the years that followed, the money came back to them with interest. Graduallythe plantation widened out, as Gerald bought more acres lying near him, and in time the whitehouse became a reality instead of a dream.
It was built by slave labor, a clumsy sprawling building that crowned the rise of groundoverlooking the green incline of pasture land running down to the river; and it pleased Geraldgreatly, for, even when new, it wore a look of mellowed years. The old oaks, which had seenIndians pass under their limbs, hugged the house closely with their great trunks and towered theirbranches over the roof in dense shade. The lawn, reclaimed from weeds, grew thick with cloverand Bermuda grass, and Gerald saw to it that it was well kept. From the avenue of cedars to therow of white cabins in the slave quarters, there was an air of solidness, of stability and permanenceabout Tara, and whenever Gerald galloped around the bend in the road and saw his own roof risingthrough green branches, his heart swelled with pride as though each sight of it were the first sight.
He had done it all, little, hard-headed, blustering Gerald.
Gerald, was on excellent terms with all his neighbors in the County, except the MacIntoshswhose land adjoined his on the left and the Slatterys whose meager three acres stretched on hisright along the swamp bottoms between the river and John Wilkes’ plantation.
The MacIntoshs were Scotch-Irish and Orangemen and, had they possessed all the saintlyqualities of the Catholic calendar, this ancestry would have damned them forever in Gerald’s eyes.
True, they had lived in Georgia for seventy years and, before that, had spent a generation in theCarolinas; but the first of the family who set foot on American shores had come from Ulster, and that was enough for Gerald.
They a close-mouthed and stiff-necked family, who kept strictly to themselves andintermarriedw(were) ith their Carolina relatives, and Gerald was not alone in disliking them, for theCounty people were neighborly and sociable and none too tolerant of anyone lacking in those samequalities. Rumors of Abolitionist sympathies did not enhance the popularity of the Macintoshes.
Old Angus had never manumitted a single slave and had committed the unpardonable social breachof selling some of his negroes to passing slave traders en route to the cane fields of Louisiana, butthe rumors persisted.
He’s an Abolitionist, no doubt,” observed Gerald to John Wilkes. “But, in an Orangeman, whena principle comes up against Scotch tightness, the principle fares ill.
The Slatterys were another affair. Being poor white, they were not even accorded the” grudgingrespect that Angus Macintosh’s dour independence wrung from neighboring families. Old Slattery,who clung persistently to his few acres, in spite of repeated offers from Gerald and John Wilkes,shiftless and whining. His wife snarly-haired woman, sickly and washed-out of appe(was) arance,themotherofabroodofsulle(was) n(a) and rabbity-looking children—a brood which wasincreased regularly every year. Tom Slattery owned no slaves, and he and his two oldest boysspasmodically worked their few acres of cotton, while the wife and younger children tended whatwas supposed to be a vegetable garden. But, somehow, the cotton always failed, and the garden,due to Mrs. Slattery’s constant childbearing, seldom furnished enough to feed her flock.
The sight of Tom Slattery dawdling on his neighbors’ porches, begging cotton seed for plantingor a side of bacon to “tide him over,” was a familiar one. Slattery hated his neighbors with whatlittle energy he possessed, sensing their contempt beneath their courtesy, and especially did he hate“rich folks’ uppity niggers.” The house negroes of the County considered themselves superior towhite trash, and their unconcealed scorn stung him, while their more secure position in life stirredhis envy. By contrast with his own miserable existence, they were well-fed, well-clothed andlooked after in sickness and old age. They were proud of the good names of their owners and, forthe most part, proud to belong to people who were quality, while he was despised by all.
Tom Slattery could have sold his farm for three times its value to any of the planters in theCounty. They would have considered it money well spent to rid the community of an eyesore, buthe was well satisfied to remain and to subsist miserably on the proceeds of a bale of cotton a yearand the charity of his neighbors.
With all the rest of the County, Gerald was on terms of amity and some intimacy. The Wilkeses,the Calverts, the Tarletons, the Fontaines, all smiled when the small figure on the big white horsegalloped up their driveways, smiled and signaled for tall glasses in which a pony of Bourbon hadbeen poured over a teaspoon of sugar and a sprig of crushed mint. Gerald was likable, and theneighbors learned in time what the children, negroes and dogs discovered at first sight, that a kindheart, a ready and sympathetic ear and an open pocketbook lurked just behind his. bawling voiceand his truculent manner.
His arrival was always amid a bedlam of hounds barking and small black children shouting asthey raced to meet him, quarreling for the privilege of holding his horse and squirming andgrinning under his good-natured insults. The white children clamored to sit on his knee and be trotted, while he denounced to their elders the infamy of Yankee politicians; the daughters of hisfriends took him into their confidence about their love affairs, and the youths of the neighborhood,fearful of confessing debts of honor upon the carpets of their fathers, found him a friend in need.
So, you’ve been owning this for a month, you young rascal!” he would shout “And, in God’sname, why haven’t you been asking me for the money before this
His rough manner of speech was too well known to give offense, and it only made the youngmen grin sheepishly and reply: “Well, sir, I hated to trouble you, and my father
Your father’s a good man, and no denying it, but strict, and so take this and let’s be hearing nomore of it
The planters’ ladies were the last to capitulate. But, when Mrs. Wilkes, “a great lady and with arare gift for silence,” as Gerald characterized her, told her husband one evening, after Gerald’shorse had pounded down the driveway. “He has a rough tongue, but he is a gentleman,” Gerald haddefinitely arrived.
He did not know that he had taken nearly ten years to arrive, for it never occurred to him that hisneighbors had eyed him askance at first. In his own mind, there had never been any doubt that hebelonged, from the moment he first set foot on Tara.
When Gerald was forty-three, so thickset of body and florid of face that he looked like a huntingsquire out of a sporting print, it came to him that Tara, dear though it was, and the County folk,with their open hearts and open houses, were not enough. He wanted a wife.
Tara cried out for a mistress. The fat cook, a yard negro elevated by necessity to the kitchen,never had the meals on time, and the chambermaid, formerly a field hand, let dust accumulate onthe furniture and never seemed to have clean linen on hand, so that the arrival of guests was alwaysthe occasion of much stirring and to-do. Pork, the only trained house negro on the place, had generalsupervision over the other servants, but even he had grown slack and careless after severalyears of exposure to Gerald’s happy-go-lucky mode of living. As valet, he kept Gerald’s bedroomin order, and, as butler, he served the meals with dignity and style, but otherwise he pretty well letmatters follow their own course.
With unerring African instinct, the negroes had all discovered that Gerald had a loud bark andno bite at all, and they took shameless advantage of him. The air was always thick with threats ofselling slaves south and of direful whippings, but there never had been a slave sold from Tara andonly one whipping, and that administered for not grooming down Gerald’s pet horse after, a longday’s hunting.
Gerald’s sharp blue eyes noticed how efficiently his neighbors’ houses were run and with whatease the smooth-haired wives in rustling skirts managed their servants. He had no knowledge ofthe dawn-till-midnight activities of these women, chained to supervision of cooking, nursing,sewing and laundering. He only saw the outward results, and those results impressed him.
The urgent need of a wife became clear to him one morning when he was dressing to ride totown for Court Day. Pork brought forth his favorite ruffled shirt, so inexpertly mended by thechambermaid as to be unwearable by anyone except his valet “Mist’ Gerald,” said Pork, gratefully rolling up the shirt as Gerald fumed, “whut you needs is awife, and a wife whut has got plen’y of house niggers.
Gerald upbraided Pork for his impertinence, hut he knew that he was right He wanted a wife andhe wanted children and, if he did not acquire them soon, it would be too late. But he was not goingto marry just anyone, as Mr. Calvert had done, taking to wife the Yankee governess of hismotherless children. His wife must be a lady and a lady of blood, with as many airs and graces asMrs. Wilkes and the ability to manage Tara as well as Mrs. Wilkes ordered her own domain.
But there were two difficulties in the way of marriage into the County families. The first was thescarcity of girls of marriageable age. The second, and more serious one, was that Gerald was a“new man,” despite his nearly ten years’ residence, and a foreigner. No one knew anything abouthis family. While the society of up-country Georgia was not so impregnable as that of the Coastaristocrats, no family wanted a daughter to wed a man about whose grandfather nothing wasknown.
Gerald knew that despite the genuine liking of the County men with whom he hunted, drank andtalked politics there was hardly one whose daughter he could marry. And he did not intend to haveit gossiped about over supper tables that this, that or the other father had regretfully refused to letGerald O’Hara pay court to his daughter. This knowledge did not make Gerald feel inferior to hisneighbors: Nothing could ever make Gerald feel that he was inferior in any way to anyone. It wasmerely a quaint custom of the County that daughters only married into families who had lived inthe South much longer than twenty-two years, had owned land and slaves and been addicted onlyto the fashionable vices during that time.
Pack up. We’re going to Savannah,” he told Pork. “And if I hear you say ‘Whist!’ or ‘Faith
but once, it’s selling you I’ll be doing, for they are words I seldom say meself.
James and Andrew might have some advice to offer on this subject of marriage, and there mightbe daughters among their old friends who would both meet his requirements and find himacceptable as a husband. James and Andrew listened to his story patiently but they gave him littleencouragement. They had no Savannah relatives to whom they might look for assistance, for theyhad been married when they came to America. And the daughters of their old friends had longsince married and were raising small children of their own.
You’re not a rich man and you haven’t a great family,” said James.
I’ve made me money and I can make a great family. And I won’t be marrying just anyone.
You fly high,” observed Andrew, dryly.
But they did their best for Gerald. James and Andrew were old men and they stood well inSavannah. They had many friends, and for a month they carried Gerald from home to home, tosuppers, dances and picnics.
There’s only one who takes me eye,” Gerald said finally. “And she not even born when Ilanded here.
And who is it takes your eye
Miss Ellen Robillard,” said Gerald, trying to speak casually, for the slightly tilting dark eyes of Ellen Robillard had taken more than his eye. Despite a mystifying listlessness of manner, sostrange in a girl of fifteen, she charmed him. Moreover, there was a haunting look of despair abouther that went to his heart and made him more gentle with her than he had ever been with any personin all the world.
And you old enough to be her father
And me in me prime!” cried Gerald stung.
James spoke gently.
Jerry, there’s no girl in Savannah you’d have less chance of marrying. Her father is a Robillard,and those French are proud as Lucifer. And her mother—God rest her soul—was a very greatlady.
I care not,” said Gerald heatedly. “Besides, her mother is dead, and old man Robillard likesme.
As a man, yes, but as a son-in-law, no.
The girl wouldn’t have you anyway,” interposed Andrew. “She’s been in love with that wildbuck of a cousin of hers, Philippe Robillard, for a year now, despite her family being at hermorning and night to give him up.
He’s been gone to Louisiana this month now,” said Gerald.
And how do you know
I know,” answered Gerald, who did not care to disclose that Pork had supplied this valuable bitof information, or that Philippe had departed for the West at the express desire of his family. “AndI do not think she’s been so much in love with him that she won’t forget him. Fifteen is too youngto know much about love.
They’d rather have that breakneck cousin for her than you.
So, James and Andrew were as startled as anyone when the news came out that the daughter ofPierre Robillard was to marry the little Irishman from up the country. Savannah buzzed behind itsdoors and speculated about Philippe Robillard, who had gone West, but the gossiping brought noanswer. Why the loveliest of the Robillard daughters should marry a loud-voiced, red-faced littleman who came hardly up to her ears remained a mystery to all.
Gerald himself never quite knew how it all came about. He only knew that a miracle hadhappened. And, for once in his life, he was utterly humble when Ellen, very white but very calm,put a light hand on his arm and said: “I will marry you, Mr. O’Hara.
The thunderstruck Robillards knew the answer in part, but only Ellen and her mammy everknew the whole story of the night when the girl sobbed till the dawn like a broken-hearted childand rose up in the morning a woman with her mind made up.
With foreboding, Mammy had brought her young mistress a small package, addressed in astrange hand from New Orleans, a package containing a miniature of Ellen, which she flung to thefloor with a cry, four letters in her own handwriting to Philippe Robillard, and a brief letter from aNew Orleans priest, announcing the death of her cousin in a barroom brawl.
They drove him away. Father and Pauline and Eulalie. They drove him away. I hate them. Ihate them all. I never want to see them again. I want to get away. I will go away where I’ll neversee them again, or this town, or anyone who reminds me of—of—him.
And when the night was nearly spent, Mammy, who had cried herself out over her mistress’ darkhead, protested, “But, honey, you kain do dat
I will do it. He is a kind man. I will do it or go into the convent at Charleston.
It was the threat of the convent that finally won the assent of bewildered and heart-strickenPierre Robillard. He was staunchly Presbyterian, even though his family were Catholic, and thethought of his daughter becoming a nun was even worse than that of her marrying Gerald O’Hara.
After all, the man had nothing against him but a lack of family.
So, Ellen, no longer Robillard, turned her back on Savannah, never to see it again, and with amiddle-aged husband, Mammy, and twenty “house niggers” journeyed toward Tara.
The next year, their first child was born and they named her Katie Scarlett, after Gerald’smother. Gerald was disappointed, for he had wanted a son, but he nevertheless was pleased enoughover his small black-haired daughter to serve rum to every slave at Tara and to get roaringly,happily drunk himself.
If Ellen had ever regretted her sudden decision to marry him, no one ever knew it, certainly notGerald, who almost burst with pride whenever he looked at her. She had put Savannah and itsmemories behind her when she left that gently mannered city by the sea, and, from the moment ofher arrival in the County, north Georgia was her home.
When she departed from her father’s house forever, she had left a home whose lines were asbeautiful and flowing as a woman’s body, as a ship in full sail; a pale pink stucco house built in theFrench colonial style, set high from the ground in a dainty manner, approached by swirling stairs,banistered with wrought iron as delicate as lace; a dim, rich house, gracious but aloof.
She had left not only that graceful dwelling but also the entire civilization that was behind thebuilding of it, and she found herself in a world that was as strange and different as if she hadcrossed a continent.
Here in north Georgia was a rugged section held by a hardy people. High up on the plateau atthe foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, she saw rolling red hills wherever she looked, with hugeoutcroppings of the underlying granite and gaunt pines towering somberly everywhere. It allseemed wild and untamed to her coast-bred eyes accustomed to the quiet jungle beauty of the seaislands draped in their gray moss and tangled green, the white stretches of beach hot beneath asemitropic sun, the long flat vistas of sandy land studded with palmetto and palm.
This was a section that knew the chill of winter, as well as the heat of summer, and there was avigor and energy in the people that was strange to her. They were a kindly people, courteous,generous, filled with abounding good nature, but sturdy, virile, easy to anger. The people of theCoast which she had left might pride themselves on taking all their affairs, even their duels andtheir feuds, with a careless air but these north Georgia people had a streak of violence in them. Onthe coast, life had mellowed—here it was young and lusty and new.
All the people Ellen had known in Savannah might have been cast from the same mold, sosimilar were their view points and traditions, but here was a variety of people. North Georgia’ssettlers were coming in from many different places, from other parts of Georgia, from theCarolinas and Virginia, from Europe and the North. Some of them, like Gerald, were new peopleseeking their fortunes. Some, like Ellen, were members of old families who had found lifeintolerable in their former homes and sought haven in a distant land. Many had moved for noreason at all, except that the restless blood of pioneering fathers still quickened in their veins.
These people, drawn from many different places and with many different backgrounds, gave thewhole life of the County an informality that was new to Ellen, an informality to which she neverquite accustomed herself. She instinctively knew how Coast people would act in any circumstance.
There was never any telling what north Georgians would do.
And, quickening all of the affairs of the section, was the high tide of prosperity then rolling overthe South. All of the world was crying out for cotton, and the new land of the County, unworn andfertile, produced it abundantly. Cotton was the heartbeat of the section, the planting and thepicking were the diastole and systole of the red earth. Wealth came out of the curving furrows, andarrogance came too—arrogance built on green bushes and the acres of fleecy white. If cotton couldmake them rich in one generation, how much richer they would be in the next
This certainty of the morrow gave zest and enthusiasm to life, and the County people enjoyedlife with a heartiness that Ellen could never understand. They had money enough and slavesenough to give them time to play, and they liked to play. They seemed never too busy to drop workfor a fish fry, a hunt or a horse race, and scarcely a week went by without its barbecue or ball.
Ellen never would, or could, quite become one of them—she had left too much of herself inSavannah—but she respected them and, in time, learned to admire the frankness and forthrightnessof these people, who had few reticences and who valued a man for what he was.
She became the best-loved neighbor in the County. She was a thrifty and kind mistress, a goodmother and a devoted wife. The heartbreak and selflessness that she would have dedicated to theChurch were devoted instead to the service of her child, her household and the man who had takenher out of Savannah and its memories and had never asked any questions.
When Scarlett was a year old, and more healthy and vigorous than a girl baby had any right tobe, in Mammy’s opinion, Ellen’s second child, named Susan Elinor, but always called Suellen, wasborn, and in due time came Carreen, listed in the family Bible as Caroline Irene. Then followedthree little boys, each of whom died before he had learned to walk—three little boys who now layunder the twisted cedars in the burying ground a hundred yards from the house, beneath threestones, each bearing the name of “Gerald O’Hara, Jr.
From the day when Ellen first came to Tara, the place had been transformed. If she was onlyfifteen years old, she was nevertheless ready for the responsibilities of the mistress of a plantation.
Before marriage, young girls must be, above all other things, sweet, gentle, beautiful and ornamental,but, after marriage, they were expected to manage households that numbered a hundredpeople or more, white and black, and they were trained with that in view.
Ellen had been given this preparation for marriage which any well-brought-up young lady received, and she also had Mammy, who could galvanize the most shiftless negro into energy. Shequickly brought order, dignity and grace into Gerald’s household, and she gave Tara a beauty it hadnever had before.
The house had been built according to no architectural plan whatever, with extra rooms addedwhere and when it seemed convenient, but, with Ellen’s care and attention, it gained a charm thatmade up for its lack of design. The avenue of cedars leading from the main road to the house—thatavenue of cedars without which no Georgia planter’s home could be complete—had a cool darkshadiness that gave a brighter tinge, by contrast, to the green of the other trees. The wistariatumbling over the verandas showed bright against the whitewashed brick, and it joined with thepink crêpe myrtle bushes by the door and the white-blossomed magnolias in the yard to disguisesome of the awkward lines of the house.
In spring time and summer, the Bermuda grass and clover on the lawn became emerald, soenticing an emerald that it presented an irresistible temptation to the flocks of turkeys and whitegeese that were supposed to roam only the regions in the rear of the house. The elders of the flockscontinually led stealthy advances into the front yard, lured on by the green of the grass and theluscious promise of the cape jessamine buds and the zinnia beds. Against their depredations, asmall black sentinel was stationed on the front porch. Armed with a ragged towel, the little negroboy sitting on the steps was part of the picture of Tara—and an unhappy one, for he was forbiddento chunk the fowls and could only flap the towel at them and shoo them.
Ellen set dozens of little black boys to this task, the first position of responsibility a male slavehad at Tara. After they had passed their tenth year, they were sent to old Daddy the plantationcobbler to learn his trade, or to Amos the wheelwright and carpenter, or Phillip the cow man, orCuffee the mule boy. If they showed no aptitude for any of these trades, they became field handsand, in the opinion of the negroes, they had lost their claim to any social standing at all.
Ellen’s life was not easy, nor was it happy, but she did not expect life to be easy, and, if it wasnot happy, that was woman’s lot. It was a man’s world, and she accepted it as such. The manowned the property, and the woman managed it. The man took the credit for the management, andthe woman praised his cleverness. The man roared like a bull when a splinter was in his finger, andthe woman muffled the moans of childbirth, lest she disturb him. Men were rough of speech andoften drunk. Women ignored the lapses of speech and put the drunkards to bed without bitterwords. Men were rude and outspoken, women were always kind, gracious and forgiving.
She had been reared in the tradition of great ladies, which had taught her how to carry herburden and still retain her charm, and she intended that her three daughters should be great ladiesalso. With her younger daughters, she had success, for Suellen was so anxious to be attractive shelent an attentive and obedient ear to her mother’s teachings, and Carreen was shy and easily led.
But Scarlett, child of Gerald, found the road to ladyhood hard.
To Mammy’s indignation, her preferred playmates were not her demure sisters or the wellbrought-up Wilkes girls but the negro children on the plantation and the boys of the neighborhood,and she could climb a tree or throw a rock as well as any of them. Mammy was greatly perturbedthat Ellen’s daughter should display such traits and frequently adjured her to “ack lak a lil lady.
But Ellen took a more tolerant and long-sighted view of the matter. She knew that from childhood playmates grew beaux in later years, and the first duty of a girl was to get married. She told herselfthat the child was merely full of life and there was still time in which to teach her the arts andgraces of being attractive to men.
To this end, Ellen and Mammy bent their efforts, and as Scarlett grew older she became an aptpupil in this subject, even though she learned little else. Despite a succession of governesses andtwo years at the near-by Fayetteville Female Academy, her education was sketchy, but no girl inthe County danced more gracefully than she. She knew how to smile so that her dimples leaped,how to walk pigeon-toed so that her wide hoop skirts swayed entrancingly, how to look up into aman’s face and then drop her eyes and bat the lids rapidly so that she seemed a-tremble with gentleemotion. Most of all she learned how to conceal from men a sharp intelligence beneath a face assweet and bland as a baby’s.
Ellen, by soft-voiced admonition, and Mammy, by constant carping, labored to inculcate in herthe qualities that would make her truly desirable as a wife.
You must be more gentle, dear, more sedate,” Ellen told her daughter. “You must not interruptgentlemen when they are speaking, even if you do think you know more about matters than theydo. Gentlemen do not like forward girls.
Young misses whut frowns an pushes out dey chins an’ says ‘Ah will’ and ‘Ah woan’ mos
gener’ly doan ketch husbands,” prophesied Mammy gloomily. “Young misses should cas’ downdey eyes an’ say, Well, suh, Ah mout’ an’ ‘Jes’ as you say, suh.
Between them, they taught her all that a gentlewoman should know, but she learned only theoutward signs of gentility. The inner grace from which these signs should spring, she never learnednor did she see any reason for learning it. Appearances were enough, for the appearances ofladyhood won her popularity and that was all she wanted. Gerald bragged that she was the belle offive counties, and with some truth, for she had received proposals from nearly all the young men inthe neighborhood and many from places as far away as Atlanta and Savannah.
At sixteen, thanks to Mammy and Ellen, she looked sweet, charming and giddy, but she was, inreality, self-willed, vain and obstinate. She had the easily stirred passions of her Irish father andnothing except the thinnest veneer of her mother’s unselfish and forbearing nature. Ellen neverfully realized that it was only a veneer, for Scarlett always showed her best face to her mother,concealing her escapades, curbing her temper and appearing as sweet-natured as she could inEllen’s presence, for her mother could shame her to tears with a reproachful glance.
But Mammy was under no illusions about her and was constantly alert for breaks in the veneer.
Mammy’s eyes were sharper than Ellen’s, and Scarlett could never recall in all her life havingfooled Mammy for long.
It was not that these two loving mentors deplored Scarlett’s high spirits, vivacity and charm.
These were traits of which Southern women were proud. It was Gerald’s headstrong and impetuousnature in her that gave them concern, and they sometimes feared they would not be able to concealher damaging qualities until she had made a good match. But Scarlett intended to marry—andmarry Ashley—and she was willing to appear demure, pliable and scatterbrained, if those were thequalities that attracted men. Just why men should be this way, she did not know. She only knew that such methods worked. It never interested her enough to try to think out the reason for it, forshe knew nothing of the inner workings of any human being’s mind, not even her own. She knewonly that if she did or said thus-and-so, men would unerringly respond with the complementarythus-and-so. It was like a mathematical formula and no more difficult, for mathematics was the onesubject that had come easy to Scarlett in her schooldays.
If she knew little about men’s minds, she knew even less about the minds of women, for theyinterested her less. She had never had a girl friend, and she never felt any lack on that account. Toher, all women, including her two sisters, were natural enemies in pursuit of the same prey—man.
All women with the one exception of her mother.
Ellen O’Hara was different, and Scarlett regarded her as something holy and apart from all therest of humankind. When Scarlett was a child, she had confused her mother with the Virgin Mary,and now that she was older she saw no reason for changing her opinion. To her, Ellen representedthe utter security that only Heaven or a mother can give. She knew that her mother was theembodiment of justice, truth, loving tenderness and profound wisdom—a great lady.
Scarlett wanted very much to be like her mother. The only difficulty was that by being just andtruthful and tender and unselfish, one missed most of the joys of life, and certainly many beaux.
And life was too short to miss such pleasant things. Some day when she was married to Ashley andold, some day when she had time for it, she intended to be like Ellen. But, until then