第135章

Home! The sprawling white house with fluttering white curtains at the windows, the thick clover on the lawn with the bees busy in it, the little black boy on the front steps shooing the ducks and turkeys from the flower beds, the serene red fields and the miles and miles of cotton turning white in the sun! Home!

If she had only gone home at the beginning of the siege, when everyone else was refugeeing! She could have taken Melanie with her in safety with weeks to spare.

“Oh, damn Melanie!” she thought a thousand times. “Why couldn’t she have gone to Macon with Aunt Pitty? That’s where she belongs, with her own kinfolks, not with me. I’m none of her blood. Why does she hang onto me so hard? If she’d only gone to Macon, then I could have gone home to Mother. Even now—even now, I’d take a chance on getting home in spite of the Yankees, if it wasn’t for this baby. Maybe General Hood would give me an escort. He’s a nice man, General Hood, and I know I could make him give me an escort and a flag of truce to get me through the lines. But I have to wait for this baby! ... Oh, Mother! Mother! Don’t die! ... Why don’t this baby ever come? I’ll see Dr. Meade today and ask him if there’s any way to hurry babies up so I can go home—if I can get an escort. Dr. Meade said she’d have a bad time. Dear God! Suppose she should die! Melanie dead. Melanie dead. And Ashley— No, I mustn’t think about that, it isn’t nice. But Ashley— No, I mustn’t think about that because he’s probably dead, anyway. But he made me promise I’d take care of her. But—if I didn’t take care of her and she died and Ashley is still alive— No, I mustn’t think about ‘that It’s sinful. And I promised God I’d be good if He would just not let Mother die. Oh, if the baby would only come. If I could only get away from here—get home—get anywhere but here.”

Scarlett hated the sight of the ominously still town now and once she had loved it. Atlanta was no longer the gay, the desperately gay place she had loved. It was a hideous place like a plague-stricken city so quiet, so dreadfully quiet after the din of the siege. There had been stimulation in the noise and the danger of the shelling. There was only horror in the quiet that followed. The town seemed haunted, haunted with fear and uncertainty and memories. People’s faces looked pinched and the few soldiers Scarlett saw wore the exhausted look of racers forcing themselves on through the last lap of a race already lost.

The last day of August came and with it convincing rumors that the fiercest fighting since the battle of Atlanta was taking place. Somewhere to the south. Atlanta, waiting for news of the turn of battle, stopped even trying to laugh and joke. Everyone knew now what the soldiers had known two weeks before—that Atlanta was in the last ditch, that if the Macon railroad fell, Atlanta would fall too.

On the morning of the first of September, Scarlett awoke with a suffocating sense of dread upon her, a dread she had taken to her pillow the night before. She thought, dulled with sleep: “What was it I was worrying about when I went to bed last night? Oh, yes, the fighting. There was a battle, somewhere, yesterday! Oh, who won?” She sat up hastily, rubbing her eyes, and her worried heart took up yesterday’s load again.

The air was oppressive even in the early morning hour, hot with the scorching promise of a noon of glaring blue sky and pitiless bronze sun. The road outside lay silent No wagons creaked by. No troops raised the red dust with their tramping feet. There were no sounds of negroes’ lazy voices in neighboring kitchens, no pleasant sounds of breakfasts being prepared, for all the near neighbors except Mrs. Meade and Mrs. Merriwether had refugeed to Macon. And she could hear nothing from their houses either. Farther down the street the business section was quiet and many of the stores and offices were locked and boarded up, while their occupants were somewhere about the countryside with rifles in their hands.

The stillness that greeted her seemed even more sinister this morning than on any of the mornings of the queer quiet week preceding it. She rose hastily, without her usual preliminary burrowings and stretchings, and went to the window, hoping to see some neighbor’s face, some heartening sight. But the road was empty. She noted how the leaves on the trees were still dark green but dry and heavily coated with red dust, and how withered and sad the untended flowers in the front yard looked.

As she stood, looking out of the window, there came to her ears a far-off sound, faint and sullen as the first distant thunder of an approaching storm.

“Rain,” she thought in the first moment, and her country-bred mind added, “we certainly need it.” But, in a split instant: “Rain? No! Not rain! Cannon!”

Her heart racing, she leaned from the window, her ear cocked to the far-off roaring, trying to discover from which direction it came. But the dim thundering was so distant that, for a moment, she could not tell. “Make it from Marietta, Lord!” she prayed. “Or Decatur. Or Peachtree Creek. But not from the south! Not from the south!” She gripped the window still tighter and strained her ears and the far-away booming seemed louder. And it was coming from the south.

Cannon to the south! And to the south lay Jonesboro and Tara—and Ellen.

Yankees perhaps at Tara, now, this minute! She listened again but the blood thudding in her ears all but blurred out the sound of far-off firing. No, they couldn’t be at Jonesboro yet. If they were that far away, the sound would be fainter, more indistinct. But they must be at least ten miles down the road toward Jonesboro, probably near the little settlement of Rough and Ready. But Jonesboro was scarcely more than ten miles below Rough and Ready.