The White Flag

by Gene Stratton-Porter

Jason took the baby because he did not know what else to do. But he stood shaking his head.

“You can’t do this, Ellen,” he said to her pleadingly. “For God’s sake, try to understand that you can’t give away your baby!”

Ellen caught up the words. “Give away my baby?” she repeated after him. “It is not I who give it away. It is you. You gave it to me when it belonged to Mahala. I tell you to take it to her!”

She pushed him into the night and closed the door behind him, regardless of the storm into which she was thrusting him. Then Jason’s soul knew fear. He was worn to the marrow with as keen suffering as any man can experience. Every nerve in his body was strained to the breaking point and a ghastly nausea possessed him inside. There was only one rational thought in his head. He must get the baby out of that storm. He must do what he had been told.

He was reeling like an intoxicated man as he staggered blindly down the road through the wildly gathering storm which broke in a torrent as he reached Mahala’s door. He realized that he might have been unable to find her door if her house had not been filled with light. Evidently, she was nervous and afraid. He could see light in every room of the house, and as he stumbled toward it, he could see Mahala’s figure passing from room to room, and he knew that she was alone and that she was afraid.

There was in his heart a fear that his knock might frighten her further, so he called at the same time. He heard her footsteps flying across the floor, and she swung the door wide. He stepped through it, already drenched, with the face and eyes of a stranger, huddling the baby against his breast.

As Mahala closed the door, she stepped back to the centre of the room. Jason held out the bundle to her. He was past the point of trying to screen her. He was past anything except a parrot-like utterance of what he had been told.

With no preliminaries, he said to Mahala: “Ellen saw us this afternoon. She won’t have her baby any longer, because she knows now that I never really loved her. She made me bring it to you. She says, because I love you, my child is yours.”

Mahala held out her palms before her as if to keep back an enemy. Every trace of colour faded from her face. Her eyes stretched their widest in amazement. She had been trying to think, trying to plan, trying to reason, all the afternoon, and the conclusion she had reached was, that to the end of their days, she and Jason must travel different roads, each carrying a burden upon their tortured shoulders, the weight of which they must learn to endure. But here was the climax. This was the worst of all. They might not even be permitted to suffer together. All afternoon she had been thinking: “Ellen has had nothing to do with this. She is perfectly innocent. She must never know.”

And now, smashing as the crash of the lightning outside, she was facing the terrible knowledge that Ellen did know, and that she had practically lost her reason through that knowledge. Her heart was primitive like the heart of every other woman. She had seen her man, she had loved him, she had taken his head on her breast, she had given him all she had to give. And through youth and inexperience, through willingness to believe, she had believed that she was having all that he had to give in return. Now she knew that she had had nothing. She had merely been an instrument. This knowledge had driven her to frenzy.