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.
The culprit sheepishly complied.
"You too!" She indicated the next, and was again obeyed. In the rear
some one whispered.
"Stella Wilkes, come here."
Habit swayed the girl a step forward before she realized that she was
tamely submitting, but she caught herself up with an oath, and returned
stare for stare.
The matron's voice sharpened.
"Stella," she repeated, "come here."
The rebel's grip upon her cudgel tightened.
"Come yourself," she retorted. "Come if you dast!"
The matron dared. Force rather than psychology had ruled the police
station of her schooling, and with the loss of her temper she reverted
instinctively to its crude argument. A rush, a glint of handcuffs
hitherto concealed, a violent brief struggle, a blow, a heavy
fall--such were the kaleidoscopic details of a battle whose whole
nobody saw perfectly, but from which Stella, the mob incarnate, emerged
unmistakably a victor. Moblike, she was also merciless, and continued
to rain blows which the half-stunned woman at her feet had power
neither to return nor fend. One of them drew blood, a scarlet thread,
which by fantastic approaches and doublings traversed the matron's now
pallid cheek and stained the whiteness of her dress.
It was then Jean woke. She was no longer among the foremost. Separated
from Stella in the sack of the upper floors, she had fallen late upon a
mirror of the matron's, miraculously preserved till her coming, and had
busied herself with its joyous ruin till the others had surged below
and the rencounter at the door had begun. With her first idle moment
apart from the common folly she experienced reaction; one glimpse of
the scene below effected a cure. She loved the vanquished as little as
the victor, but her every instinct for fair play and decency cried out
against the wanton blows, and drove her hotly through the press to the
dazed woman's side.
The surprise of the attack, more than its strength, disconcerted
Stella, and Jean had pulled the matron to her feet before retaliation
was possible. Nimble wits likewise counted most in the immediate
sequel. Quite in the moment of her charge Jean spied a coil of
fire-hose, which, used not half an hour ago for the sake of coolness,
lay still connected with its hydrant, and its possibilities flashed
instantly upon her. Before the ringleader's slow brain could divine her
purpose she had thrust the nozzle into the matron's fingers and sprung
to release the flood. Stella saw the advantages of this neglected
weapon now, and plunged to capture it, but a stream as thick as a
man's wrist took her squarely in the face with the pent energy of a
long descent from the hills, and brought her gasping to her knees.
Before she fairly caught her breath she was handcuffed and helpless,
and the matron, all bustle and resource with the turning of the tide,
was issuing crisp orders to as drenched, frightened, and abjectly
obedient a band of rebels as ever made unconditional surrender.
To her real conqueror Stella at least made full and volcanic
acknowledgment. The guardhouse alone stemmed the sulphurous eruption
which she poured out upon Jean's past, present, and future; and the
girls who heard shivered thankfully that another than themselves must
drag out existence under the blighting fear of such a requital. The
official attitude was more dispassionate. Barring now and again a
puzzled glance, as at some insoluble riddle, the matron in no wise
singled her preserver from the common run of mutineers to whom she
meted out added rigors and penalties for their offence. Far from
hastening her return to cottage life by her service in the cause of
law and order, Jean learned that she had narrowly escaped doubling
her prison term, and that the fact that the good in her conduct had
been allowed to weigh over against the evil was deemed a piece of
extraordinary clemency.
Yet even if that brief reign of unreason had added a half-year of
prison to the six months which a brief interval would round, its lesson
would not have been dear-bought; for, as she had returned richer by
a new conception of her womanhood from the flight of which the prison
was the price, so now she wrung sanity from her yielding to madness.
It terrified her that she could for one moment have become like these
weak pawns in an incomprehensible game, and the recoil intrenched her
in a fastness of self-control such as her girlhood had never conceived.
Happily there came also at this time another influence no less
wholesome and far-reaching.
One morning of early winter she quitted the prison in charge of a clerk
from the superintendent's office, who led the way to Cottage No. 6.
Jean's heart sank as they crossed the threshold. In the optimism born
of new resolutions she had hoped for a different lot. What availed new
resolutions here! But she was no sooner within than she was conscious
of a changed atmosphere. Bare as they were, the corridors seemed less
institutional; the recreation hall, glimpsed in passing, smiled an
almost animate greeting; while the room in which she was told to await
the cottage matron's leisure resembled the room it had been in nothing
save its four walls. Amy Jeffries, dusting the window-seat as if she
enjoyed it, was actually humming.
"Howdy!" she called. "Welcome home."
Jean lifted a warning finger.
"Somebody will hear," she cautioned. "Where will be your high grade
then?"
Amy grinned broadly.
"Noticed it, did you?" She pivoted complacently before a mirror. "Don't
I look for all the world like a trained nurse? Can't you just see me
doing the wedding march with the grateful millionaire I've pulled
through typhoid! Glory, but I am tickled to get out of checks!"
Jean was vexed at her folly.
"You'll get into them again mighty quick if she hears," she whispered.
"Don't be a fool."
"She!" Amy turned to stare. "Well, if you're not in from the backwoods!
You don't mean to say you haven't heard that the Holy Terror is gone?"
"Gone? You mean--"
"I mean g-o-n-e, gone--cleared out, skipped, skedaddled. Can't you
understand plain English? I thought everybody knew. She left a week ago
to be married."
"Married!"
"Ain't it the limit? Fancy _that_ with a husband!"
Jean tried, but failed. Stupendous as it was, this marvel paled in
interest beside the fact that Cottage No. 6 had lost its martinet.
Small wonder the house beamed.
"And the new matron is different?" she said.
"Different! Dif--" Amy became incoherent with amusement. "Say, but you
folks in the jug have been exclusive since the riot! You shouldn't be,
really you shouldn't. You miss so many things, you know. There was the
Astor ball, and the Vanderbilt dinner, and the swellest little supper
at Sherry's I've gone to this seas--"
All Amy's members were pinchable. Jean nipped the nearest.
"Has something happened, or hasn't there?" she demanded.
"Would I be talking here like a human being, not a jailbird, if
something corking hadn't happened?" She had a table between them now.
"Why, I wouldn't be high grade at all. There's been a new deal in No.
6 with a vengeance. You couldn't guess who's matron if I gave you all
day."
Jean's face went suddenly radiant.
"Not Miss Archer!"
"You smart thing," said Amy, crestfallen.
"Then it's true! It's really true?" The news was too wonderful for
credence. "I can't make it out."
"Neither can I. Why, she's even come over here at a smaller salary.
Ain't that a puzzler? I know because I heard her talking it over with
the Supe--the Terror had chased me up to the offices on an errand; and
you can bet I listened when I caught on that there was something coming
for No. 6. As near as I can figure it out, the riot's at the bottom of
it, but just why that should make Miss Archer throw up a better job and
better pay to camp down here beats little Amy. I'm no rapping medium."
Where Amy failed, Jean, with the clairvoyance of a finer nature,
presently divined the truth. It flashed upon her at the end of an hour
alone with the little matron, a wonderful, inspiring hour which she
came to look back upon as crucial--a forking of the ways where to have
chosen wrongly would have meant to miss life's best. Yet she could
never take it apart; its texture was gossamer. It helped nothing to
recall that the talk had sprung first from one or another of the room's
inanimate objects--some cast, book, picture, or bit of pottery--whose
sum mirrored Miss Archer's personality; yet one of them had surely been
the key to a Garden of the Spirit where common things underwent magical
transformations. The vague longings and aspirations which the forest
meeting had sown, seemed rank, uncertain growths no longer; precious,
rather, and infinitely desirable.
Jean drew a long breath when they separated.
"At first I could not understand why you came," she said; "but it's
plain now. It was to help--to help girls like me."