The White Flag

by Gene Stratton-Porter

When the sudden resolve had come to her, after the injustice of being picked up bodily and forcibly without her consent or approval and set down among strangers in a strange town, there had developed suddenly in her heart a storm of rebellion that had ended in her seeking refuge and independence with Nancy Bodkin. She had no idea what Martin Moreland would do when he went to the house to which he had sent her, with the expectation in his heart that he would find at least one room of it to his liking and warm with the reception to which he was accustomed. She had thought that he would come to the store, and in the daze of the early weeks of her transplantation, she had lifted a set face and a combative eye every time a hand was laid upon the latch.

One day she had seen Martin Moreland upon the opposite side of the street, and sick at heart, she had fled to her room and thrown herself upon her bed, complaining of a headache. For several hours she lay there in torment, expecting each minute that the door would open and Nancy Bodkin would level the finger of scorn at her, that the clear light of her gray eyes would pierce her covering and see burning upon her breast the loathsome scarlet brand. But night had come and Nancy Bodkin had brought her a cup of tea, had brushed her hair and unlaced her shoes.

In the days that followed, Marcia found herself still watching the street and the front door, but each day of her emancipation so fortified her that she began to develop a confidence and an assurance. She did not know Martin Moreland as well as she thought she did, when in the third year, she had definitely made up her mind that he would not come. She did not realize that he was the kind of a man who figured in his heart that every step higher she climbed in the community that was so graciously receiving her, would make harder the fall when the day came upon which he decided to turn the tongue of gossip and slander against her. Whenever he was passing through Bluffport on business, he made a point of stopping on the opposite side of the street and taking a detailed survey of the millinery store. He watched from the small beginnings of soaped glass and painted casings, through the four years to the new brick building with its attractive windows. The first time he passed the new building, obtrusive in its newness, glowing with the dainty colours of its excuse for being, the smile on his face was a fearful thing to see. It was a thing shaded by such a degree of malevolence that his consciousness realized that no one must see it. It would be an outward manifestation of such an inward state as would shock a casual observer. Even as that smile gathered and broke, with the same instinct which prompted it, Martin Moreland clapped the palm of his deeply scarred right hand over his face and an instant later applied a handkerchief. As the smile died away, in its stead there came a look that was very like the expression on the face of a hungry panther ready to leap with certainty upon an unsuspecting victim.

Martin Moreland knew that, early in their separation, Marcia would expect him and be on the defensive. He figured that by waiting until the passage of time had given her assurance, his descent would be all the more crushing and spectacular.

So it happened that Marcia occasionally saw him passing upon the street and grew firm in her confidence that she was to go free. With the passing of the years, she succeeded in a large measure in forgetting her ugly past and allaying tremors for the future. It appealed to her that Martin Moreland could do nothing to hurt or humiliate her without humiliating himself; and that, she figured, he would not do. She became all the more certain of this because occasionally she saw Junior on the streets of Bluffport, and from the security of the store, she watched him as he walked the streets or stood talking with other men.

To the observer, Junior was an extremely handsome man. He had his father’s height, his mother’s dark hair and eyes. There was a dull flush of red in his cheeks and on his lips. He could not have helped knowing that he was a handsome and an attractive figure. He could scarcely have helped being unmoral through his father’s training from his early childhood. Always he had been supplied with a liberal amount of money to use as he chose in the gambling rooms of Ashwater with the other men and boys. Occasionally he lost, but frequently he came into the bank with surprisingly large sums of money which he gave to his father to deposit on his account. A few times, lounging in the bank, even during his school days, he had listened to discussions between his father and other men concerning matters of business and he had made suggestions so ingenious, so simple in their outward manifestations, so astute, so deep in their inward import, that the Senior Moreland had been in transports. He always had been proud of his son. When to his fine figure and handsome face he added indications of shrewd business ability, he fulfilled his father’s highest dream for him.

Whenever occurrences of this kind took place, Moreland Senior immediately supplied Moreland Junior with an unusually liberal allowance with which to cut a wide swath in the social life of the town. During the junior and senior years of high school, Junior made a practice of arming himself with large boxes of sweets and huge bouquets of expensive flowers and going to call upon Mahala.

Mahala always greeted him cordially, always accepted what he brought casually as a matter of course, but never with any particular show of pleasure. Having been accustomed to the admiring glances of women and the exaggeratedly lavish praise of an element of the town greedy for his father’s money, Junior could not believe that this attitude on the part of Mahala was genuine. She must think him as handsome as his mirror proved to him that he was. She must see that he was tall and straight and shapely. Knowing the value of dry goods as she did, she could not fail to know that always he was expensively clothed in the very latest fashions sent out from the large cities of the East.

A few days before Commencement, armed with a particularly ornate box of candy and a bunch of long-stemmed roses by way of an ice box from Chicago, he made an evening call upon Mahala. The box of candy she set upon the piano, unopened. The roses she arranged in a large vase. She commented on their wonderful shape and velvet petals, the splendid stems and leaves faintly touched with the bloom of rankly growing things. She said that they were so perfect that it almost seemed that they were not real roses that would yellow and wither in a few days.

They talked of the coming Commencement and Junior jestingly asked Mahala if she were going to allow Edith Williams to be more handsomely gowned than she. Mahala was amused that he should think of such a thing. She looked at him with eyes so frank that to the boy they seemed almost friendly. She laughed the contagious laugh of happy youth.