In Gone With The Wind, Ashley Wilkes is away fighting in the war, and when Melanie stops getting letters from him, they worry that he might be dead.
But he doesn't die, and eventually he shows up at Tara.
---------------------- [excerpt] --------------- "...If the war had not come I would have lived out my life, happily buried at Twelve Oaks, contentedly watching life go by and never being a part of it. But when the war came, life as it really is thrust itself against me. ...The worst thing about the war was the people I had to live with.
"I had sheltered myself from people all my life, I had carefully selected my few friends. But the war taught me I had created a world of my own with dream people in it. It taught me what people really are, but it didn't teach me how to live with them. And I'm afraid I'll never learn.
Now, I know that in order to support my wife and child, I will have to make my way among a world of people with whom I have nothing in common. You, Scarlett, are taking life by the horns and twisting it to your will. But where do I fit in the world any more? I tell you I am afraid."
While his low resonant voice went on, desolate, with a feeling she could not understand, Scarlett clutched at words here and there, trying to make sense of them. But the words swooped from her hands like wild birds. Something was driving him, driving him with a cruel goad, but she did not understand what it was.
"Scarlett, I don't know just when it was that the bleak realization came over me that my own private shadow show was over. Perhaps in the first five minutes at Bull Run when I saw the first man I killed drop to the ground. But I knew it was over and I could no longer be a spectator.
...My little inner world was gone, invaded by people whose thoughts were not my thoughts, whose actions were as alien as a Hottentot's. They'd tramped through my world with slimy feet and there was no place left where I could take refuge when things became too bad to stand.
When I was in prison, I thought: When the war is over, I can go back to the old life.
...But, Scarlett, there's no going back. And this which is facing all of us now is worse than war and worse than prison -- and, to me, worse than death..."
"But, Ashley," she began, floundering in a quagmire of bewilderment, "if you're afraid we'll starve, why -- why -- Oh, Ashley, we'll manage somehow! I know we will!"
For a moment, his eyes came back to her, wide and crystal gray, and there was admiration in them. Then, suddenly, they were remote again and she knew with a sinking heart that he had not been thinking about starving. They were always like two people talking to each other in different languages.
But she loved him so much that, when he withdrew as he had now done, it was like the warm sun going down and leaving her in chilly twilight dews.
She wanted to catch him by the shoulders and hug him to her, make him realize that she was flesh and blood and not something he had read or dreamed. If she could only feel that sense of oneness with him for which she had yearned since that day, so long ago, when he had come home from Europe and stood on the steps of Tara and smiled up at her.
"Starving's not pleasant," he said. "I know for I've starved, but I'm not afraid of that. I am afraid of facing life without the slow beauty of our old world that is gone."
Scarlett thought despairingly that Melanie would know what he meant.
Melly and he were always talking such foolishness, poetry and books and dreams and moonrays and star dust. He was not fearing the things she feared, not the gnawing of an empty stomach, nor the keenness of the winter wind nor eviction from Tara. He was shrinking before some fear she had never known and could not imagine. For, in God's name, what was there to fear in this wreck of a world but hunger and cold and the loss of home?
And she had thought that if she listened closely she would know the answer to Ashley.
"Oh!" she said and the disappointment in her voice was like that of a child who opens a beautifully wrapped package to find it empty. At her tone, he smiled ruefully as though apologizing.
"Forgive me, Scarlett, for talking so. I can't make you understand because you don't know the meaning of fear. You have the heart of a lion and an utter lack of imagination and I envy you both of those qualities. You'll never mind facing realities and you'll never want to escape from them as I do."
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{Gone With The Wind, a novel written by Margaret Mitchell}
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