“‘But the end of life is in none of these things. It is more than all, and it includes them all. The end of life is not to deny self, nor to be true, nor to keep the Ten Commandments—it is simply to do God’s will. It is not to get good nor be good, nor even to do good—it is just what God wills, whether that be working or waiting, or winning or losing, or suffering or recovering, or living or dying.
“‘But this conception is too great for us. It is the greatest conception of man that has ever been given to the world. The great philosophers, from Socrates and Plato to Kant and Mill, have given us their conception of the ideal human life. But none of them is at all so great as this. Each of them has constructed what they call a universal life, a life for all men and all time to copy. None of them is half so deep, so wonderful, so far-reaching, as this: “I have found . . . a man after my own heart, who shall fulfill all my will.”’”
It fell quiet for a few moments as they all contemplated the profound words of the renowned Edinburgh professor, dead now fourteen years. When Jocelyn next spoke, her words were not to the members of her family.
“Dear Father,” she prayed quietly, “with all my heart I do want to be a woman of whom you can say the same words you said of David, that you have found one after your own heart, who will fulfill your will. I thank you so much for loving me as I am, even for creating me as I am, that I might show forth your handiwork. It is my desire ever more fully to be your daughter, a daughter pleasing to you—one who does as you would have her do, who thinks as you would have her think, whose attitudes are ones you would have fill her being. Help me, Father, reflect you in all I do, in all I say, in all I am. Help me to ask what would Jesus do in everything that comes my way. Help me to walk in your will, do your will, and fulfill your will for me.”
“Amen,” whispered Charles softly.
“That was a beautiful prayer, Mother,” said Catharine, looking toward her mother with moist eyes. Her sweet smile was one of daughterly affection and a sister’s mutual love for their common Lord.
Jocelyn returned the smile. After the deep expression of Jocelyn’s heart, there seemed little more for anyone to say. Gradually each of the four returned to their books.
34
Suffragette or Society Belle?
Never in her life had Amanda Rutherford been so busy. Balancing her exciting new social life with ongoing suffragette activities, every day was full from morning till night. Despite the brief awkwardness at the coronation reception, and the occasional annoyance of Geoffrey’s presence, she had to admit it was a wonderful time. This is what she had always dreamed her life in London would be.
Even though she had been, as she saw it, deprived of a proper coming out at seventeen, and her family had never been part of the London scene, Amanda knew well enough what it all meant. She had read her Austen and Dickens, her Thackeray and Trollope. There was a surface gaiety to many of the gatherings. But she knew that fathers from throughout England came to London for the season to engage in the serious business of shopping their daughters around in what was rudely referred to as the “marriage market.” She realized well enough that she was being “looked at.”
Amanda was not anxious to marry. But she would play along, relish in the attention, and enjoy the round of concerts, parties, dances, dinner parties, and myriad other social occasions which the London season offered. Generally, if a girl did not get herself married within two or three seasons, she was in danger of being considered a failure altogether. But Amanda was enough of a modernist not to worry about such conventions. That she had started late did not make her the more anxious, but rather enabled her to take a more modest perspective of her future.
And she had come to admit, there was more to Cousin Martha than first met the eye. In her own way, Amanda admired her for being able to content herself in her marriage to Gifford Rutherford. Not that Amanda would ever be content with a man like her father’s first cousin. But Martha managed to find purpose and meaning in her life in spite of it, and Amanda respected her for it.
Emmeline Pankhurst couldn’t tolerate such women, and railed against exactly Martha’s kind for contributing to the male domination of society.
Yet Amanda could not despise Cousin Martha. Maybe every woman couldn’t fight for equality in the same way. Maybe what Cousin Martha had said to her on their first meeting was true, that there were different ways to exert one’s influence, and she had chosen hers.
Amanda’s supply of funds continued slowly to dwindle. She said nothing about it. Yet Martha seemed to understand and did what she could to make things easier for her.
There could not help but be awkwardness, of course, being involved with both Ramsay and Geoffrey, especially when both appeared at many of the same places. But as much as she would have loved to, Amanda could not ignore Geoffrey. The simple fact was, he was her ticket to society.
All the while, Amanda had not paused to reflect deeply concerning just what she really wanted, and why. Sooner or later she would no doubt be forced to choose between being a suffragette or a young lady of society. For the present, even Amanda herself did not understand what were her innermost driving passions.
So much of what she had become involved with had initially been a means to get away from home and express her individuality and independence. She thought she wanted to change the world and make it a better place. But did the suffragette cause really drive her as it did the Pankhursts? Amanda had not really stopped to ask.
She thought she wanted to be part of society. But did she really want to marry? Or did her motives spring merely from desiring to be the center of attention in what, on the surface at least, seemed an exciting and romantic world? Neither was this a query she had considered.
To ask herself such questions would have plunged Amanda into more self-analysis than she was prepared for. Thus she went along—her motives and activities and hopes filled with more contradictions than logic—doing what came to her to do, all the while trying to convince herself that it was the fun and fulfilling and independent life she had always longed for.
Meanwhile, by late 1911 it became apparent that the slippery Mr. Asquith had managed again to evade bringing the House of Commons to a resolution on the matter of women’s suffrage. Several meetings were held between parliamentary leaders and the Pankhursts, without result.
One afternoon following such a meeting Emmeline was obviously upset. She calmed long enough as they sat down for afternoon tea to give a brief prayer of thanks, and to ask God’s blessing on their activities. As Amanda bowed her head and listened, the curious fact did not strike her that the Pankhursts’ religion did not grate on her like that of her father.
“Sylvia, would you pour?” said Emmeline as she passed the plate of breads to Christabel. The two daughters always took seats on either side of their mother, whether at the tea table, in a cab, or when standing before a crowd of women. Christabel spoke as she passed the plate on to Amanda.
“So what did you mean, Mother,” she said, “when you came in a while ago, that today was the last straw?”
“I have tried to be patient,” replied Emmeline, sipping at her tea but obviously still agitated. “We have tried to work through the system of government. But the House of Commons is intractable. It became obvious to me at today’s meeting that they have no intention of granting us the vote. There is talk, talk, talk, all very soothing and placating. They pretend to be in agreement, but nothing is ever done.”
“So what do you mean by the last straw?” asked Amanda.
“Just this—that it is time to take matters into our own hands. It is time to initiate our own tactics to show this country and its leaders that we will not be put off so easily.”
As she listened to her mother speak, Christabel’s eyes were alight. “What are we going to do, Mother?” she asked.
“We will begin with London’s windows,” replied Mrs. Pankhurst. “I am certain that will get Parliament’s attention!”
And indeed, as soon
as they could arrange it, a window-smashing raid was led against the home office, the war office, the foreign office, and at least a dozen other governmental buildings and men’s clubs. Carrying rocks and hammers in their bags and under their coats, hundreds of women shattered thousands of windows. Over two hundred women were arrested, and a hundred and fifty sent to prison for varying sentences of up to a month.
Emmeline and Sylvia and Christabel thought nothing now of being arrested. Christabel, in fact, was slowly coming to replace her mother as the leader of the militant arm of the movement. At night, carloads of women drove out of the city to replenish their stores of rocks. Nor was jail a deterrent. For in prison the women could go on hunger strikes, which gained as much publicity for their cause as did riots, marches, and speeches.
Meanwhile, their magazine Votes for Women occupied more and more time and advocated more outlandish tactics. Telephone wires were cut, jam and tar were spread in mailboxes of notables who opposed them. Some fires in London and a few small bombs were attributed to the suffragettes.
By now all London was in an uproar, and public opinion was sharply divided.
Amanda, however, was no longer interested in being in jail or going on a hunger strike. And she certainly wasn’t about to conceal a knife or hatchet in her coat at a rally! Even going to a ball on Cousin Geoffrey’s arm was better than throwing a bomb, setting a fire, starving herself, or being arrested. Gradually it became more and more difficult for Amanda to identify herself with the Pankhursts and all they stood for.
35
The Chest
As Amanda walked the tightrope between remaining a suffragette while living the life of a society debutante, and not really sure how much of either world she even wanted to be part of, her brother and sister were involved in an adventure of their own.
High in the garret portion of one wing of Heathersleigh Hall, still without benefit of electricity, George led Catharine, with an oil lantern in his hand, through a darkened and narrow passageway, then down a flight of stairs.
“Are you still frightened in here,” said George as they went, “like you were the first time I showed it to you?”
“I wasn’t afraid.”
“You were too!” chided George playfully. “Don’t you remember—you were worried about ghosts.”
“Amanda put that into my head, but I knew there weren’t any. And later, I only asked you about ghosts to make it more interesting for you so that you would think I was afraid.”
“I must admit that to be an original explanation!”
“But what I have always been curious about,” said Catharine, changing the subject, “is why all these funny passageways were built in the first place.”
“That’s why I brought you here today,” said George. “I think I have finally discovered something to shed some light on that mystery.”
“Really? George, that’s great . . . what!”
“Well, maybe not why . . . but possibly who. And that might be the first step toward unraveling the why as well.”
George led the way through various narrow passageways until they came at length to the storeroom on the second floor of the north wing from which he had first discovered the hidden labyrinth within the walls of the Hall. Up the narrow stairs through the floor of the room George climbed. He extinguished the lantern and set it on the floor, then reached down to lend Catharine a steadying hand as she climbed up. A minute later they were both in the room where only two weeks ago George and his father had completed the installation of an overhead light.
“Now we’ll be able to see what we’re doing,” said George. “Isn’t the light great?”
“But why does a storage room need electricity?”
“Father and I want to have current in every room of the Hall. And we almost have. But I want to show you what’s in this old chest.”
“Why did we come through the garret instead of just walking up the stairs and down the hall?” asked Catharine.
“It just seemed more fitting, since we were going to try to unravel the mystery.”
“George, were you trying to see if you could frighten me!”
“I would never do that,” he replied with a grin. “I was just getting us into the right frame of mind—you know, Sherlock Holmes and all that. Although now that you put the idea in my head, I’ll have to see what kind of spookiness I might think up.”
“It won’t work. I’m too old for all that.”
“What about some dark and stormy night, with the wind howling and the lightning flashing . . .”
“There’s nothing spooky about that.”
“Ah, but what if right at the stroke of midnight, you heard a wailing scream from somewhere behind the walls of your room?”
“You wouldn’t dare!” laughed Catharine. Even as she tried to make light of it, however, her expression gave away the merest hint of anxiety that her brother might be serious.
“Me . . . dare what?” replied George innocently. “I’m sure if something like that happened, I would be asleep in my bed. I was only asking what you would do in such a case?”
“Well it’s not going to happen, because if it did, you would know that something worse just might come your way a few nights later . . . so there!”
George smiled shrewdly. Catharine returned the look with a flash of her grey eyes. The challenge had been laid down, and both knew it.
“What I brought you here to show you was this,” said George, now dragging the wooden container into the center of the room. “That’s how I first discovered the stairway beneath the floorboards. I got curious about this chest—what was I, probably about sixteen at the time—and when I pulled it out, the boards underneath it were loose. I had been prowling around and exploring for years. But that’s when I discovered how this room connected with the library, the garret, and the tower.”
“How does all that tell us who was behind it?” asked his sister.
“It’s in the chest,” rejoined George. “The instant I found it I was curious what was inside it. But as soon as I discovered the passageway under the stairs, I forgot all about it. It was just full of papers anyway. But then when Father and I were working in here a week or two ago, I saw it still sitting there against the wall and was reminded of my earlier curiosity. And I thought to myself, ‘What if there’s something in those papers that might be interesting?’”
“Was there?”
“It’s interesting to me. I’ll show you. Father and I’ve been so busy with the wiring and putting in fixtures that I didn’t get a chance to come back and dig into it until this morning . . .”
George paused and opened the lid of the chest.
“—that’s when I found this.”
36
The Ledger
Catharine knelt down and bent forward to look inside the chest. It appeared about half full of notebooks, files, journals, various ships’ logbooks, a dozen or so envelopes filled with records, receipts, and letters, and stacks of loose, miscellaneous papers.
George reached in and withdrew a thick brown leather journal, each of whose cover-boards was brittle and badly decayed but still holding together. Across the front, barely legible, were the words “Construction and Labor Accounts.”
“What is it?” asked Catharine, her own curiosity now mounting.
“As far as I can tell it is the financial ledger for the original construction of Heathersleigh Hall, as well as for later building and remodeling and various other related construction projects about the estate.”
George carefully opened back the cover.
“Look,” exclaimed Catharine. “The first entry is dated 1629.”
“That’s when work on the Hall apparently began,” said George, “because then follow pages and pages of accounts and references and expenditures—”
As he spoke George flipped through the yellowing pages at the front of the journal.
“—until you get here.”
He stopped and pointed to the bottom of a page. C
atharine followed his finger to the reference.
“Look . . . date, 1647,” said George, “when it appears to me that the original structure, which would be the north wing, was completed. Then a second section begins a few years later, 1661, where you have the records for the east wing, which as far as I can tell was built between then and 1678. That’s how the Hall must have looked for a couple of generations, an L-shaped building comprised of the north and east wings with the tower between them.”
“I wish there were drawings,” said Catharine.
“I’m sure there must be someplace in here,” replied George. “I’m going to initiate a careful search of everything in this entire chest. I did run across a few entries that seem to refer to engineers’ plans. No project of this size could have been completed without drawings.”
“Can you really make heads or tails of all those entries?” asked Catharine, pointing to one of the pages.
“Not a lot,” replied her brother. “But enough to get some idea how the construction progressed. This is mostly a financial account, so there’s a limit to how interesting it can be. But it is a place to begin.”
“To begin what?”
“Figuring out the history of the Hall. Can you imagine how fascinating it would be to unlock the Hall’s secrets all the way back to the beginning?”
“A list of numbers and expenses can’t do that, George.”
“It might tell us when certain things happened. Already we’ve discovered when the different wings were built. We’ve learned quite a bit already from this ledger. Often it’s finances that unlock doors in other areas.”
Wayward Winds Page 15