Chapter 22: What to expect when your sister-in-law is expecting....and the Yankees are coming

As I said before, I don't know anything about childbirth.

But I know something about hot weather, long afternoons, and "lazy insolent flies." I don't like animals or insects as a rule and I hate being hot, so MM's description of the interior of Melly's room at the beginning of chapter 22 really drives home the horror of that sticky day when Atlanta fell and Scarlett was forced to stay there and help her "frenemy" deliver her baby.

Scarlett is sweating, Melly is sweating, Prissy is sweating, the Yankees are coming, and nobody can leave the room until the baby is born.  I like to think of myself as pretty brave, and I think I have a great deal of physical courage.  But I haven't had kids yet, and I'm frankly terrified about the process of having a baby. As a matter of fact, a relative of mine recently had a baby and I visited her in the hospital not too long after the delivery.  I tried to keep a stiff upper lip, but I was terrified just listening to her discuss the whole process.  I realize that Scarlett has already been a mother for some time by this point in the story and is therefore not as freaked out by childbirth as I am at the current time, but labor was dangerous back then. Dangerous and messy and Melly had a very difficult time pushing little Beau out. I probably would have abandoned Melly and rushed out to Decatur street to get drunk right away, and it/s a testament to Scarlett's strength--and some latent goodness in her character--that she stays at her post like a good little soldier and helps Melly.

Scarlett is usually described as a selfish character, but during the middle of the novel she certainly displays a great deal of strength and reliability, doesn't she? Melly Wilkes is one of the most popular women in Atlanta, but every other woman in the town has abandoned these two young girls at the time when they need help the most.  All those friends and neighbors have taken flight to safer pastures, but Scarlett stayed and now Scarlett is the one who is required to sit there and suffer along with Melly because they don't know where else to turn for help and "every friend had failed her."

Incredibly, eventually "it was all over.  Melanie was not dead and the small baby boy who made noises like a young kitten," is getting his first bath by nightfall.  According to the interweb, sunrise in Atlanta on September 1st is at 7:12AM and sunset occurs on that date at 8:03PM. Melly Wilkes has been in labor since before dawn and Scarlett emerges into black darkness when it's all over, and I think it's safe to assume that Melly was therefore in labor for 13 or 14 hours.  NPR says the average first-time mother takes about 6.5 hours to deliver her first child, so through the magic of lazy research we see that Melly was in labor for about twice the average amount of time.  Mix in the heat and the Yankee approach, plus the fact that Scarlett and Prissy have absolutely no idea what in the hell they are doing and...

Yeah, Melly's a real trooper, isn't she?

But incredibly, MM doesn't actually recount every single detail of Melly's labor.  I personally would have chosen to describe this all in a linear fashion, going hour-by-hour in order to bleed out every last bit of emotion from this pathetic circumstance, but MM decides to skip the event itself and gives us a recap of everything that happened while also using it as an opportunity for Scarlett to grouse about Prissy some more.  And this is one of my all-time favorite paragraphs in the book, and one of the funniest collection of sentences I've ever read:

"From the shadows, Scarlett glared at her, too tired to rail, too tired to upbraid, too tired to enumerate Prissy's offenses--her boastful assumption of experience she didn't possess, her fright, her blundering awkwardness, her utter inefficiency when the emergency was hot, the misplacing of the scissors, the spilling of the basin of water on the bed, the dropping of the new born baby." 

All of which paints an outrageous, incredible, and hilarious picture of what actually transpired.  Melly didn't die and the baby appears healthy, so the end result was a success, but it sounds like it was all touch-and-go doesn't it?  MM isn't really given enough credit for her droll humor, and it's hard not to crack a smile whenever Scarlett suffers a fool, isn't it? Scarlett hates many things, but "blundering," "fright," and "inefficiency" would have to be in the top three of things she actively despises.  Charles Hamilton was described in almost the exact same way as Prissy is in this section, wasn't he?

Anyway, Scarlett eventually comes to her senses and remembers that there is one person left in Atlanta for her to call on: Rhett Butler! She tells Prissy to search for him in the following places in the following order--

1. The Atlanta Hotel  (Where he lives, apparently.  This is interesting to me now on this re-read because--isn't this the first time that we hear of Rhett living anywhere?  I mean, it's not like his residency is any sort of a secret, but it's pretty interesting that Scarlett has never once mentioned anything about where he lives, isn't it? Again, she knows a lot about him but since she doesn't love him or obsess about him the way she loves and obsesses about Ashley Wilkes. Rhett hardly ever features in Scarlett's internal musings). 
2. The Decatur Street barrooms (LOL) 
3. Belle Watling's house (Double LOL!) 

Prissy puts up a fight (of course), but eventually she agrees to run off to find Rhett and "tell him to come quickly and bring his horse and carriage or an ambulance if he can get one." 

And at this point in the novel I had absolutely no idea what to expect.  MM leaves a bunch of unanswered questions and loose threads over the course of these few chapters, and I had absolutely no idea what was going to happen next.  Was Prissy going to be able to find Rhett? And if she did find him (which is absolutely no guarantee considering Atlanta's a big city and the world is ending) would he be drunk? Would he actually agree to come help Scarlett, or was he just as mad at her as she was at him?  And if he did make it to Scarlett in time, would they all be able to leave town before Atlanta burned to the ground?  What about Melly? She's just had a baby and...surely it wouldn't be safe for her to go back to Tara in a wagon after everything she'd just experienced?