Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell Page A

rascal!” he would shout. “And, in God’s name, why haven’t you been asking me for the money before this?”
    His rough manner of speech was too well known to give offense, and it only made the young men grin sheepishly and reply: “Well, sir, I hated to trouble you, and my father—”
    â€œYour father’s a good man, and no denying it, but strict, and so take this and let’s be hearing no more of it.”
    The planters’ ladies were the last to capitulate. But, when Mrs. Wilkes, “a great lady and with a rare gift for silence,” as Gerald characterized her, told her husbandone evening, after Gerald’s horse had pounded down the driveway, “He has a rough tongue, but he is a gentleman,” Gerald had definitely arrived.
    He did not know that he had taken nearly ten years to arrive, for it never occurred to him that his neighbors had eyed him askance at first. In his own mind, there had never been any doubt that he belonged, from the moment he first set foot on Tara.
    When Gerald was forty-three, so thickset of body and florid of face that he looked like a hunting squire out of a sporting print, it came to him that Tara, dear though it was, and the County folk, with their open hearts and open houses, were not enough. He wanted a wife.
    Tara cried out for a mistress. The fat cook, a yard negro elevated by necessity to the kitchen, never had the meals on time, and the chambermaid, formerly a field hand, let dust accumulate on the furniture and never seemed to have clean linen on hand, so that the arrival of guests was always the occasion of much stirring and to-do. Pork, the only trained house negro on the place, had general supervision over the other servants, but even he had grown slack and careless after several years of exposure to Gerald’s happy-go-lucky mode of living. As valet, he kept Gerald’s bedroom in order, and, as butler, he served the meals with dignity and style, but otherwise he pretty well let matters follow their own course.
    With unerring African instinct, the negroes had all discovered that Gerald had a loud bark and no bite at all, and they took shameless advantage of him. The air was always thick with threats of selling slaves south and of direful whippings, but there never had been a slave sold from Tara and only one whipping, and that administeredfor not grooming down Gerald’s pet horse after a long day’s hunting.
    Gerald’s sharp blue eyes noticed how efficiently his neighbors’ houses were run and with what ease the smooth-haired wives in rustling skirts managed their servants. He had no knowledge of the dawn-till-midnight activities of these women, chained to supervision of cooking, nursing, sewing and laundering. He only saw the outward results, and those results impressed him.
    The urgent need of a wife became clear to him one morning when he was dressing to ride to town for Court Day. Pork brought forth his favorite ruffled shirt, so inexpertly mended by the chambermaid as to be unwearable by anyone except his valet.
    â€œMist’ Gerald,” said Pork, gratefully rolling up the shirt as Gerald fumed, “whut you needs is a wife, and a wife whut has got plen’y of house niggers.”
    Gerald upbraided Pork for his impertinence, but he knew that he was right. He wanted a wife and he wanted children and, if he did not acquire them soon, it would be too late. But he was not going to marry just anyone, as Mr. Calvert had done, taking to wife the Yankee governess of his motherless children. His wife must be a lady and a lady of blood, with as many airs and graces as Mrs. Wilkes and the ability to manage Tara as well as Mrs. Wilkes ordered her own domain.
    But there were two difficulties in the way of marriage into the County families. The first was the scarcity of girls of marriageable age. The second, and more serious one, was that Gerald was a “new man,” despite his nearly ten years’