第338章

On the crest of this wave of vulgarity, Scarlett rode triumphantly, newly a bride, dashingly pretty in her fine clothes, with Rhett’s money solidly behind her. It was an era that suited her, crude, garish, showy, full of overdressed women, overfurnished houses, too many jewels, too many horses, too much food, too much whisky. When Scarlett infrequently stopped to think about the matter she knew that none of her new associates could be called ladies by Ellen’s strict standards. But she had broken with Ellen’s standards too many times since that far-away day when she stood in the parlor at Tara and decided to be Rhett’s mistress, and she did not often feel the bite of conscience now.

Perhaps these new friends were not, strictly speaking, ladies and gentlemen but like Rhett’s New Orleans friends, they were so much fun! So very much more fun than the subdued, churchgoing, Shakespeare-reading friends of her earlier Atlanta days. And, except for her brief honeymoon interlude, she had not had fun in so long. Nor had she had any sense of security. Now secure, she wanted to dance, to play, to riot, to gorge on foods and fine wine, to deck herself in silks and satins, to wallow on soft feather beds and fine upholstery. And she did all these things. Encouraged by Rhett’s amused tolerance, freed now from the restraints of her childhood, freed even from that last fear of poverty, she was permitting herself the luxury she had often dreamed—of doing exactly what she pleased and telling people who didn’t like it to go to hell.

To her had come that pleasant intoxication peculiar to those whose lives are a deliberate slap in the face of organized society—the gambler, the confidence man, the polite adventuress, an those who succeed by their wits. She said and did exactly what she pleased and, in practically no time, her insolence knew no bounds.

She did not hesitate to display arrogance to her new Republican and Scalawag friends but to no class was she ruder or more insolent than the Yankee officers of the garrison and their families. Of all the heterogeneous mass of people who had poured into Atlanta, the army people alone she refused to receive or tolerate. She even went out of her way to be bad mannered to them. Melanie was not alone in being unable to forget what a blue uniform meant. To Scarlett, that uniform and those gold buttons would always mean the fears of the siege, the terror of flight, the looting and burning, the desperate poverty and the grinding work at Tara. Now that she was rich and secure in the friendship of the governor and many prominent Republicans, she could be insulting to every blue uniform she saw. And she was insulting.

Rhett once lazily pointed out to her that most of the male guests who assembled under their roof had worn that same blue uniform not so long ago, but she retorted that a Yankee didn’t seem like a Yankee unless he had on a blue uniform. To which Rhett replied: “Consistency, thou art a jewel,” and shrugged.

Scarlett, hating the bright hard blue they wore, enjoyed snubbing them all the more because it so bewildered them. The garrison families had a right to be bewildered for most of them were quiet, well-bred folk, lonely in a hostile land, anxious to go home to the North, a little ashamed of the riffraff whose rule they were forced to uphold—an infinitely better class than that of Scarlett’s associates. Naturally, the officers’ wives were puzzled that the dashing Mrs. Butler took to her bosom such women as the common red-haired Bridget Flaherty and went out of her way to slight them.

But even the ladies whom Scarlett took to her bosom had to endure much from her. However, they did it gladly. To them, she not only represented wealth and elegance but the old regime, with its old names, old families, old traditions with which they wished ardently to identify themselves. The old families they yearned after might have cast Scarlett out but the ladies of the new aristocracy did not know it. They only knew that Scarlett’s father had been a great slave owner, her mother a Robillard of Savannah and her husband was Rhett Butler of Charleston. And this was enough for them. She was their opening wedge into the old society they wished to enter, the society which scorned them, would not return calls and bowed frigidly in churches. In fact, she was more than their wedge into society. To them, fresh from obscure beginnings, she was society. Pinchbeck ladies themselves, they no more saw through Scarlett’s pinchbeck pretensions than she herself did. They took her at her own valuation and endured much at her hands, her airs, her graces, her tempers, her arrogance, her downright rudeness and her frankness about their shortcomings.

They were so lately come from nothing and so uncertain of themselves they were doubly anxious to appear refined and feared to show their temper or make retorts in kind, lest they be considered unladylike. At all costs they must be ladies. They pretended to great delicacy, modesty and innocence. To hear them talk one would have thought they had no legs, natural functions or knowledge of the wicked world. No one would have thought that red-haired Bridget Flaherty, who had a sun-defying white skin and a brogue that could be cut with a butter knife, had stolen her father’s hidden hoard to come to America to be chambermaid in a New York hotel. And to observe the delicate vapors of Sylvia (formerly Sadie Belle) Connington and Mamie Bart, no one would have suspected that the first grew up above her father’s saloon in the Bowery and waited on the bar at rush times, and that the latter, so it was said, had come out of one of her husband’s own brothels. No, they were delicate sheltered creatures now.