ON AN AFTERNOON OF THE FOLLOWING WEEK, Scarlett came home from the
hospital weary and indignant. She was tired from standing on her feet all
morning and irritable because Mrs. Merriwether had scolded her sharply for
sitting on a soldier’s bed while she dressed his wounded arm. Aunt Pitty
and Melanie, bonneted in their best, were on the porch with Wade and
Prissy, ready for their weekly round of calls. Scarlett asked to be excused
from accompanying them and went upstairs to her room.
When the last sound of carriage wheels had died away and she knew the
family was safely out of sight, she slipped quietly into Melanie’s room and
turned the key in the lock. It was a prim, virginal little room and it lay still
and warm in the slanting rays of the four-o’clock sun. The floors were
glistening and bare except for a few bright rag rugs, and the white walls
unornamented save for one corner which Melanie had fitted up as a shrine.
Here, under a draped Confederate flag, hung the gold-hilted saber that
Melanie’s father had carried in the Mexican War, the same saber Charles
had worn away to war. Charles’ sash and pistol belt hung there too, with
his revolver in the holster. Between the saber and the pistol was a
daguerreotype of Charles himself, very stiff and proud in his gray uniform,
his great brown eyes shining out of the frame and a shy smile on his lips.
Scarlett did not even glance at the picture but went unhesitatingly
across the room to the square rosewood writing box that stood on the table
beside the narrow bed. From it she took a pack of letters tied together with
a blue ribbon, addressed in Ashley’s hand to Melanie. On the top was the
letter which had come that morning and this one she opened.
Occasionally, she thought with a sinking heart, “What would Mother say if
she knew?” She knew Ellen would rather see her dead than know her guilty
of such dishonor. This had worried Scarlett at first, for she still wanted to
be like her mother in every respect. But the temptation to read the letters
was too great and she put the thought of Ellen out of her mind. She had
become adept at putting unpleasant thoughts out of her mind these days.
She had learned to say, “I won’t think of this or that bothersome thought
now. I’ll think about it tomorrow.” Generally when tomorrow came, the
thought either did not occur at all or it was so attenuated by the delay it
was not very troublesome. So the matter of Ashley’s letters did not lie very
heavily on her conscience.
Melanie was always generous with the letters, reading parts of them
aloud to Aunt Pitty and Scarlett. But it was the part she did not read that
tormented Scarlett, that drove her to surreptitious reading of her sister-in-
law’s mail. She had to know if Ashley had come to love his wife since
marrying her. She had to know if he even pretended to love her. Did he
address tender endearments to her? What sentiments did he express and
with what warmth?
She carefully smoothed out the letter.
Ashley’s small even writing leaped up at her as she read, “My dear wife,”
and she breathed in relief. He wasn’t calling Melanie “Darling” or
“Sweetheart” yet.
“My dear wife: You write me saying you are alarmed lest I be concealing
my real thoughts from you and you ask me what is occupying my mind
these days—”
“Mother of God!” thought Scarlett, in a panic of guilt. “‘Concealing his
real thoughts.’ Can Melly have read his mind? Or my mind? Does she
suspect that he and I—”
Her hands trembled with fright as she held the letter closer, but as she
read the next paragraph she relaxed.
“Dear Wife, if I have concealed aught from you it is because I did not
wish to lay a burden on your shoulders, to add to your worries for my
physical safety with those of my mental turmoil. But I can keep nothing
from you, for you know me too well. Do not be alarmed. I have no wound. I
have not been ill. I have enough to eat and occasionally a bed to sleep in.
A soldier can ask for no more. But, Melanie, heavy thoughts lie on my
heart and I will open my heart to you.
“These summer nights I lie awake, long after the camp is sleeping, and I
look up at the stars and, over and over, I wonder, ‘What am I fighting
for?’ Not for honor and glory, certainly. War is a dirty business and I
do not like dirt. I am not a soldier and I have no desire to seek the
bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth. Yet, here I am at the
wars—whom God never intended to be other than a studious country
gentleman. For, Melanie, bugles do not stir my blood nor drums entice my
feet and I see too clearly that we have been betrayed, betrayed by our
arrogant Southern selves, believing that one of us could whip a dozen
Yankees, believing that King Cotton could rule the world. Betrayed, too, by
words and catch phrases, prejudices and hatreds coming from the mouths of
those highly placed, those men whom we respected and revered—‘King Cotton,
Slavery, States’ Rights, Damn Yankees.’
“And so when I lie on my blanket and look up at the stars and say
‘What am I fighting for?’ I think of States’ Rights and cotton and the
darkies and the Yankees whom we have been bred up to hate, and I know
that none of these is the reason why I am fighting. Instead, I see Twelve
Oaks and remember how the moonlight slants across the white columns,
and the unearthly way the magnolias look, opening under the moon, and
how the climbing roses make the side porch shady even at hottest noon.
And I see Mother, sewing there, as she did when I was a little boy. And I
hear the darkies coming home across the fields at dusk, tired and singing
and ready for supper, and the sound of the windlass as the bucket goes
down into the cool well. And there’s the long view down the road to the
river, across the cotton fields, and the mist rising from the bottom
lands in the twilight. And that is why I’m here who have no love of death
or misery or glory and no hatred for anyone. Perhaps that is what is
called patriotism, love of home and country. But, Melanie, it goes deeper
than that. For, Melanie, these things I have named are but the symbols of the
thing for which I risk my life, symbols of the kind of life I love. For I am
fighting for the old days, the old ways I love so much but which, I fear, are
now gone forever, no matter how the die may fall. For, win or lose, we lose
just the same.”
“If we win this war and have the Cotton Kingdom of our dreams, we still
have lost, for we will become a different people and the old quiet ways will
go. The world will be at our doors clamoring for cotton and we can command
our own price. Then, I fear, we will become like the Yankees, at whose
money-making activities, acquisitiveness and commercialism we now sneer. And
if we lose, Melanie, if we lose! I am not afraid of danger or capture or
wounds or even death, if death must come, but I do fear that once this war is
over, we will never get back to the old times. And I belong in those old
times. I do not belong in this mad present of killing and I fear I will not
fit into any future, try though I may. Nor will you, my dear, for you and I
are of the same blood. I do not know what the future will bring, but it
cannot be as beautiful or as satisfying as the past.”
But Scarlett carefully folded up the letter without finishing it and thrust
it back into the envelope, too bored to read further. Besides, the tone of the
letter vaguely depressed her with its foolish talk of defeat. After all, she
wasn’t reading Melanie’s mail to learn Ashley’s puzzling and uninteresting
ideas. She had had to listen to enough of them when he sat on the porch at
Tara in days gone by.
All she wanted to know was whether he wrote impassioned letters to his
wife. So far he had not. She had read every letter in the writing box and
there was nothing in any one of them that a brother might not have written to a
sister. They were affectionate, humorous, discursive, but not the letters of a
lover. Scarlett had received too many ardent love letters herself not to recognize the
authentic note of passion when she saw it. And that note was missing. As always
after her secret readings, a feeling of smug satisfaction enveloped her, for she felt
certain that Ashley still loved her. And always she wondered sneeringly why Melanie did not realize that Ashley only loved her as a friend. Melanie evidently found nothing lacking
in her husband’s messages but Melanie had had no other man’s love letters with which
to compare Ashley’s.
“He writes such crazy letters,” Scarlett thought. “If ever any husband of mine
wrote me such twaddle-twaddle, he’d certainly hear from me! Why, even Charlie wrote better letters than these.”
She stood for a moment holding the letters to her breast, thinking
longingly of Ashley. Her emotions toward him had not changed since the day when she
first fell in love with him. They were the same emotions that struck her speechless that day when she was fourteen years old and she had
stood on the porch of Tara and seen Ashley ride up smiling, his hair shining silver in
the morning sun. Her love was still a young girl’s adoration for a man she could not understand, a man who possessed all the qualities she did not own but which she admired. He was still a young girl’s dream of the Perfect Knight and her dream asked no more than acknowledgment of his love, went no further than hopes of a kiss.
After reading the letters, she felt certain he did love her, Scarlett, even though he had married Melanie, and that certainty was almost all that she
desired. She was still that young and untouched. Had Charles with his
fumbling awkwardness and his embarrassed intimacies tapped any of the
deep vein of passionate feeling within her, her dreams of Ashley would not
be ending with a kiss. But those few moonlight nights alone with Charles had not touched her emotions or ripened her to maturity. Charles had awake ned no idea of what passion might be or tenderness or true intimacy of body or spirit.
All that passion meant to her was servitude to inexplicable male
madness, unshared by females, a painful and embarrassing process that led
inevitably to the still more painful process of childbirth. That marriage should be like this was no surprise to her. Ellen had hinted before the wedding that marriage was something women must bear with dignity and fortitude, and the whispered comments of other matrons since her
widowhood had confirmed this. Scarlett was glad to be done with passion and marriage.
She was done with marriage but not with love, for her love for Ashley was something different, having nothing to do with passion or marriage, something sacred and breath-takingly beautiful, an emotion that grew stealthily through the long days of her enforced silence, feeding on oft-thumbed memories and hopes.
She sighed as she carefully tied the ribbon about the packet, wondering for the thousandth time just what it was in Ashley that eluded her understanding. She tried to think the matter to some satisfactory conclusion but, as always, the conclusion evaded her uncomplex mind. She put the letters back in the lap secretary and closed the lid. Then she frowned, for her mind went back to the last part of the letter she had just read, to his mention of Captain Butler. How strange that Ashley should be impressed by something that scamp had said a year ago. Undeniably Captain Butler was a scamp, for all that he danced divinely. No one but a scamp would say the things about the Confederacy that he had said at the bazaar.
She crossed the room to the mirror and patted her smooth hair approvingly. Her spirits rose, as always at the sight of her white skin and slanting green eyes, and she smiled to bring out her dimples. Then she dismissed Captain Butler from her mind as she happily viewed her reflection, remembering how Ashley had always liked her dimples. No pang of conscience at loving another woman’s husband or reading that woman’s mail disturbed her pleasure in her youth and charm and her renewed assurance of Ashley’s love.
She unlocked the door and went down the dim winding stair with a light
heart. Halfway down she began singing “When This Cruel War Is Over.”
