as for cherishing them, wasn't she bathing them, combing their hair and-feeding them, even at the expense of walking miles every day to find vegetables? Wasn't she learning to milk the cow, even though her heart was always in her throat when that fearsome animal shook its horns at her? And as for being kind, that was a waste of time. If she was overly kind to them, they'd probably prolong their stay in bed, and she wanted them on their feet again as soon as possible, so there would be four more hands to help her.
They were convalescing slowly and lay scrawny and weak in their bed. While they had
been unconscious, the world had changed. The Yankees had come, the darkies had gone and
Mother had died. Here were three unbelievable happenings and their minds could not take them in. Sometimes they believed they must still be delirious and these things had not happened at all.
Certainly Scarlett was so changed she couldn't be real. When she hung over the foot of their bed and outlined the work she expected them to do when they recovered, they looked at her as if she were a hobgoblin. It was beyond their comprehension that they no longer had a hundred slaves to do the work. It was beyond their comprehension that an O'Hara lady should do manual labor.
"But, Sister," said Carreen, her sweet childish face blank with consternation. "I couldn't split kindling! It would ruin my hands!"
"Look at mine," answered Scarlett with a frightening smile as she pushed blistered and calloused palms toward her.
"I think you are hateful to talk to Baby and me like this!" cried Suellen. "I think you are lying and trying to frighten us. If Mother were only here, she wouldn't let you talk to us like this!
Split kindling, indeed!"
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 disappearings 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.