VI
Stella hailed the recruit with shrill satisfaction, clutched her by the arm lest her allegiance falter, and beckoned on her amazons.
"Smash the prison first," she screamed. "We'll show 'em."
Back into the grim archway they swept, a frenzied, yelling horde, and flung themselves into a fury of destruction. The window-panes crashed first; then followed fusillades of crockery from dining-room and kitchen. Nothing breakable survived; where glass failed, they demolished furniture; lacking wood, they fell upon the plumbing.
Treading close in Stella's vandal wake, Jean laid waste right and left with hands which she hazily perceived were but mere automata under another unknown self's control. She was a dual being, thinking one thing, doing its opposite. The active personality disquieted yet fascinated the critical real self, and she realized, half dismayed, that if Stella Wilkes should waver in her leadership, the mad, alien Jean Fanshaw would in all likelihood leap to replace her.
But Stella harbored no thought of abdication. Her reign had just begun. What was the too brief interval which had sufficed to wreck the hated prison! There was as good pillage in the cottages, she reminded them; better still in the administration buildings and the chapel. The chapel now! What splendid atrocities they could wreak upon the big organ! And after the chapel, why not storm the gatehouse? What were a handful of guards! The gatehouse and liberty! Fired with this dream of conquest, the mob armed itself with scraps of wreckage and trooped back to the entrance to confront a thorough surprise. Bolted doors blocked their triumphal progress—bolted doors and the matron, calm, resolute, unarmed, and absolutely alone.
The quadrangle, too, had had its happenings. With the superintendent absent, her assistant ill, and the few male guards at the gatehouse but mere creatures of routine, wholly incapable of the generalship which the crisis demanded, the outbreak could scarcely have been more effectively timed; yet order somehow issued from confusion. Officials acting separately bundled such of their charges as had not yielded to hysteria into the cottages, and hurried back to cope with the open mutiny. With this the prison matron demanded the right to deal. It had flamed out in her special province; it was hers to quench if her authority was to mean anything thereafter; and she stubbornly declined aid. Not even the guards might enter with her; she would meet the situation single-handed.
The rioters faced the lonely figure stupidly. Their clamor sank to whispers, then silence. Their eyes blinked and shifted under the cold survey which passed deliberately from girl to girl, missing none, condemning all.
Suddenly the matron levelled a finger at a weak-jawed offender in the van.
"Drop that stick!" she commanded.