EPTfoot since infancy, the faces of the three on the porch were
neither slack nor soft. They had the vigor and alertness of
country people who have spent all their lives in the open and
troubled their heads very little with dull things in books. Life
in the north Georgia county of Clayton was still new and,
according to the standards of Augusta, Savannah and Charleston, a
little crude. The more sedate and older sections of the South
looked down their noses at the up-country Georgians, but here in
north Georgia, a lack of the niceties of classical education
carried no shame, provided a man was smart in the things that
mattered. And raising good cotton, riding well, shooting
straight, dancing lightly, squiring the ladies with elegance and
carrying one's liquor like a gentleman were the things that
mattered.
In these accomplishments the twins excelled, and they were equally
outstanding in their notorious inability to learn anything
contained between the covers of books. Their family had more
money, more horses, more slaves than any one else in the County,
but the boys had less grammar than most of their poor Cracker
neighbors.
It was for this precise reason that Stuart and Brent were idling
on the porch of Tara this April afternoon. They had just been
expelled from the University of Georgia, the fourth university
that had thrown them out in two years; and their older brothers,
Tom and Boyd, had come home with them, because they refused to
remain at an institution where the twins were not welcome. Stuart
and Brent considered their latest expulsion a fine joke, and
Scarlett, who had not willingly opened a book since leaving the
Fayetteville Female Academy the year before, thought it just as
amusing as they did.
"I know you two don't care about being expelled, or Tom either,"
she said. "But what about Boyd? He's kind of set on getting an
education, and you two have pulled him out of the University of
Virginia and Alabama and South Carolina and now Georgia. He'll
never get finished at this rate."
"Oh, he can read law in Judge Parmalee's office over in
Fayetteville," answered Brent carelessly. "Besides, it don't
matter much. We'd have had to come home before the term was out
anyway."
"Why?"
"The war, goose! The war's going to start any day, and you don't
suppose any of us would stay in college with a war going on, do
you?"
"You know there isn't going to be any war," said Scarlett, bored.
"It's all just talk. Why, Ashley Wilkes and his father told Pa
just last week that our commissioners in Washington would come
to--to--an--amicable agreement with Mr. Lincoln about the
Confederacy. And anyway, the Yankees are too scared of us to
fight. There won't be any war, and I'm tired of hearing about
it."
"Not going to be any war!" cried the twins indignantly, as though
they had been defrauded.
"Why, honey, of course there's going to be a war," said Stuart.
"The Yankees may be scared of us, but after the way General
Beauregard shelled them out of Fort Sumter day before yesterday,
they'll have to fight or stand branded as cowards before the whole
world. Why, the Confederacy--"
Scarlett made a mouth of bored impatience.
"If you say 'war' just once more, I'll go in the house and shut
the door. I've never gotten so tired of any one word in my life
as 'war,' unless it's 'secession.' Pa talks war morning, noon and
night, and all the gentlemen who come to see him shout about Fort
Sumter and States' Rights and Abe Lincoln till I get so bored I
could scream! And that's all the boys talk about, too, that and
their old Troop. There hasn't been any fun at any party this
spring because the boys can't talk about anything else. I'm
mighty glad Georgia waited till after Christmas before it seceded
or it would have ruined the Christmas parties, too. If you say
'war' again, I'll go in the house."
She meant what she said, for she could never long endure any
conversation of which she was not the chief subject. But she
smiled when she spoke, consciously deepening her dimple and
fluttering her bristly black lashes as swiftly as butterflies'
wings. The boys were enchanted, as she had intended them to be,
and they hastened to apologize for boring her. They thought none
the less of her for her lack of interest. Indeed, they thought
more. War was men's business, not ladies', and they took her
attitude as evidence of her femininity.
Having maneuvered them away from the boring subject of war, she
went back with interest to their immediate situation.
"What did your mother say about you two being expelled again?"
The boys looked uncomfortable, recalling their mother's conduct
three months ago when they had come home, by request, from the
University of Virginia.
"Well," said Stuart, "she hasn't had a chance to say anything yet.
Tom and us left home early this morning before she got up, and
Tom's laying out over at the Fontaines' while we came over here."
"Didn't she say anything when you got home last night?"
"We were in luck last night. Just before we got home that new
stallion Ma got in Kentucky last month was brought in, and the
place was in a stew. The big brute--he's a grand horse, Scarlett;
you must tell your pa to come over and see him right away--he'd
already bitten a hunk out of his groom on the way down here and
he'd trampled two of Ma's darkies who met the train at Jonesboro.
And just before we got home, he'd about kicked the stable down and
half-killed Strawberry, Ma's old stallion. When we got home, Ma
was out in the stable with a sackful of sugar smoothing him down
and doing it mighty well, too. The darkies were hanging from the
rafters, popeyed, they were so scared, but Ma was talking to the
horse like he was folks and he was eating out of her hand. There
ain't nobody like Ma with a horse. And when she saw us she said:
'In Heaven's name, what are you four doing home again? You're
worse than the plagues of Egypt!' And then the horse began
snorting and rearing and she said: 'Get out of here! Can't you
see he's nervous, the big darling? I'll tend to you four in the
morning!' So we went to bed, and this morning we got away before
she could catch us and left Boyd to handle her."
"Do you suppose she'll hit Boyd?" Scarlett, like the rest of the
County, could never get used to the way small Mrs. Tarleton
bullied her grown sons and laid her riding crop on their backs if
the occasion seemed to warrant it.
Beatrice Tarleton was a busy woman, having on her hands not only a
large cotton plantation, a hundred negroes and eight children, but
the largest horse-breeding farm in the state as well. She was
hot-tempered and easily plagued by the frequent scrapes of her
four sons, and while no one was permitted to whip a horse or a
slave, she felt that a lick now and then didn't do the boys any
harm.
"Of course she won't hit Boyd. She never did beat Boyd much
because he's the oldest and besides he's the runt of the litter,"
said Stuart, proud of his six feet two. "That's why we left him
at home to explain things to her. God'lmighty, Ma ought to stop
licking us! We're nineteen and Tom's twenty-one, and she acts
like we're six years old."
"Will your mother ride the new horse to the Wilkes barbecue
tomorrow?"
"She wants to, but Pa says he's too dangerous. And, anyway, the
girls won't let her. They said they were going to have her go to
one party at least like a lady, riding in the carriage."
"I hope it doesn't rain tomorrow," said Scarlett. "It's rained
nearly every day for a week. There's nothing worse than a
barbecue turned into an indoor picnic."
"Oh, it'll be clear tomorrow and hot as June," said Stuart.
"Look at that sunset. I never saw one redder. You can always
tell weather by sunsets."
They looked out across the endless acres of Gerald O'Hara's newly
plowed cotton fields toward the red horizon. Now that the sun was
setting in a welter of crimson behind the hills across the Flint
River, the warmth of the April day was ebbing into a faint but
balmy chill.
Spring had come early that year, with warm quick rains and sudden
frothing of pink peach blossoms and dogwood dappling with white
stars the dark river swamp and far-off hills. Already the plowing
was nearly finished, and the bloody glory of the sunset colored
the fresh-cut furrows of red Georgia clay to even redder hues.
The moist hungry earth, waiting upturned for the cotton seeds,
showed pinkish on the sandy tops of furrows, vermilion and scarlet
and maroon where shadows lay along the sides of the trenches. The
whitewashed brick plantation house seemed an island set in a wild
red sea, a sea of spiraling, curving, crescent billows petrified
suddenly at the moment when the pink-tipped waves were breaking
into surf. For here were no long, straight furrows, such as could
be seen in the yellow clay fields of the flat middle Georgia
country or in the lush black earth of the coastal plantations.
The rolling foothill country of north Georgia was plowed in a
million curves to keep the rich earth from washing down into the
river bottoms.
It was a savagely red land, blood-colored after rains, brick dust
in droughts, the best cotton land in the world. It was a pleasant
land of white houses, peaceful plowed fields and sluggish yellow
rivers, but a land of contrasts, of brightest sun glare and
densest shade. The plantation clearings and miles of cotton
fields smiled up to a warm sun, placid, complacent. At their
edges rose the virgin forests, dark and cool even in the hottest
noons, mysterious, a little sinister, the soughing pines seeming
to wait with an age-old patience, to threaten with soft sighs:
"Be careful! Be careful! We had you once. We can take you back
again."
To the ears of the three on the porch came the sounds of hooves,
the jingling of harness chains and the shrill careless laughter
of negro voices, as the field hands and mules came in from the
fields. From within the house floated the soft voice of
Scarlett's mother, Ellen O'Hara, as she called to the little black
girl who carried her basket of keys. The high-pitched, childish
voice answered "Yas'm," and there were sounds of footsteps going
out the back way toward the smokehouse where Ellen would ration
out the food to the home-coming hands. There was the click of
china and the rattle of silver as Pork, the valet-butler of Tara,
laid the table for supper.
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