Soot from the newly erected factories fell in showers on the white houses.
By night, the furnaces glowed and the hammers clanged long after townsfolk were abed.
Where vacant lots had been a year before, there were now factories turning out harness, saddles and shoes, ordnance-supply plants making rifles and cannon, rolling mills and foundries producing iron rails and freight cars to replace those destroyed by the Yankees, and a variety of industries manufacturing spurs, bridle bits, buckles, tents, buttons, pistols and swords.
Already the foundries were beginning to feel the lack of iron, for little or none came through the blockade, and the mines in Alabama were standing almost idle while the miners were at the front.
There were no iron picket fences, iron summerhouses, iron gates or even iron statuary on the lawns of Atlanta now, for they had early found their way into the melting pots of the rolling mills.
Here along Peachtree Street and near-by streets were the headquarters of the various army departments, each office swarming with uniformed men, the commissary, the signal corps, the mail service, the railway transport, the provost marshal.
On the outskirts of town were the remount depots where horses and mules milled about in large corrals, and along side streets were the hospitals.
As Uncle Peter told her about them, Scarlett felt that Atlanta must be a city of the wounded, for there were general hospitals, contagious hospitals, convalescent hospitals without number.
And every day the trains just below Five Points disgorged more sick and more wounded.
The little town was gone and the face of the rapidly growing city was animated with never-ceasing energy and bustle.
The sight of so much hurrying made Scarlett, fresh from rural leisure and quiet, almost breathless, but she liked it.
There was an exciting atmosphere about the place that uplifted her. It was as if she could actually feel the accelerated steady pulse of the town’s heart beating in time with her own.
As they slowly made their way through the mudholes of the town’s chief street, she noted with interest all the new buildings and the new faces.
The sidewalks were crowded with men in uniform, bearing the insignia of all ranks and all service branches; the narrow street was jammed with vehicles—carriages, buggies, ambulances, covered army wagons with profane drivers swearing as the mules struggled through the ruts; gray-clad couriers dashed spattering through the streets from one headquarters to another, bearing orders and telegraphic dispatches; convalescents limped about on crutches, usually with a solicitous lady at either elbow; bugle and drum and barked orders sounded from the drill fields where the recruits were being turned into soldiers; and with her heart in her throat, Scarlett had her first sight of Yankee uniforms, as Uncle Peter pointed with his whip to a detachment of dejected-looking bluecoats being shepherded toward the depot by a squad of Confederates with fixed bayonets, to entrain for the prison camp.
“Oh,” thought Scarlett, with the first feeling of real pleasure she had experienced since the day of the barbecue,
“I’m going to like it here!
It’s so alive and exciting!”
The town was even more alive than she realized, for there were new barrooms by the dozens; prostitutes, following the army, swarmed the town and bawdy houses were blossoming with women to the consternation of the church people.
Every hotel, boarding house and private residence was crammed with visitors who had come to be near wounded relatives in the big Atlanta hospitals.
There were parties and balls and bazaars every week and war weddings without number, with the grooms on furlough in bright gray and gold braid and the brides in blockade-run finery, aisles of crossed swords, toasts drunk in blockaded champagne and tearful farewells.
Nightly the dark tree-lined streets resounded with dancing feet, and from parlors tinkled pianos where soprano voices blended with those of soldier guests in the pleasing melancholy of
“The Bugles Sang Truce” and
“Your Letter Came, but Came Too Late”—plaintive ballads that brought exciting tears to soft eyes which had never known the tears of real grief.
As they progressed down the street, through the sucking mud, Scarlett bubbled over with questions and Peter answered them, pointing here and there with his whip, proud to display his knowledge.
“Dat air de arsenal.
Yas’m, dey keeps guns an’ sech lak dar.
No'm, dem air ain’ sto’s, dey’s blockade awfisses.
Law, Miss Scarlett, doan you know whut blockade awfisses is?
Dey’s awfisses whar furriners stays dat buy us Confedruts’ cotton an’ ship it outer Cha’ston and Wilmin’ton an’ ship us back gunpowder.
No'm, Ah ain’ sho whut kine of furriners dey is.
Miss Pitty, she say dey is Inlish but kain nobody unnerstan a’ wud dey says.
Yas’m ’tis pow'ful smoky an’ de soot jes’ ruinin’ Miss Pitty’s silk cuttins.
It’ frum de foun'ry an’ de rollin’ mills.
An’ de noise dey meks at night!
Kain nobody sleep.
No'm, Ah kain stop fer you ter look around.
Ah done promise Miss Pitty Ah bring you straight home... Miss Scarlett, mek yo’ cu'tsy.
Dar’s Miss Merriwether an’ Miss Elsing a-bowin’ to you.”
Scarlett vaguely remembered two ladies of those names who came from Atlanta to Tara to attend her wedding and she remembered that they were Miss Pittypat’s best friends.
So she turned quickly where Uncle Peter pointed and bowed.
The two were sitting in a carriage outside a drygoods store.
The proprietor and two clerks stood on the sidewalk with armfuls of bolts of cotton cloth they had been displaying.
Mrs. Merriwether was a tall, stout woman and so tightly corseted that her bust jutted forward like the prow of a ship.
Her iron-gray hair was eked out by a curled false fringe that was proudly brown and disdained to match the rest of her hair. She had a round, highly colored face in which was combined good-natured shrewdness and the habit of command.
Mrs. Elsing was younger, a thin frail woman, who had been a beauty, and about her there still clung a faded freshness, a dainty imperious air.
These two ladies with a third, Mrs. Whiting, were the pillars of Atlanta.
They ran the three churches to which they belonged, the clergy, the choirs and the parishioners.
They organized bazaars and presided over sewing circles, they chaperoned balls and picnics, they knew who made good matches and who did not, who drank secretly, who were to have babies and when.
They were authorities on the genealogies of everyone who was anyone in Georgia, South Carolina and Virginia and did not bother their heads about the other states, because they believed that no one who was anybody ever came from states other than these three.
They knew what was decorous behavior and what was not and they never failed to make their opinions known—Mrs. Merriwether at the top of her voice, Mrs. Elsing in an elegant die-away drawl and Mrs. Whiting in a distressed whisper which showed how much she hated to speak of such things.