The Mormon Prophet Part 12

"But, Mr. Smith, St. Peter saw the sheet in a dream; there isn't anything in the Bible about things or people floating in the air when people are awake."

"Well, I don't know, sister, about that. There was Philip when he finished baptisin' the African. Ye see, in going to Azotus he must have gone up before he went along, or he'd have struck agen the trees; and our brother Newell, not being as good as Philip, and not having as much faith, ye see, he jest began to go and had to come back again. Mebbe when he's engaged in the work for a year or two he'll become an apostle too. Did ye never think, Sister Halsey, that Providence might take us up, intending to do great things with us, and jest have to set us down because we hadn't learned to have faith enough?"

This spiritual significance of the episode of Newell Knight had not occurred to Susannah before. It touched her own case.

He went on. "When I think of the future that is opening before us, Sister Halsey--why, when I think of how all the nations are to be gathered in--there's persecutions in store, and we must be tried by fire, but there's riches and honour and blessing for those as shall be steadfast; and it's borne in upon me that the Kingdom shall be set up in the west of this land." He turned and looked at her, becoming elevated in mind and rising again into finer language. "And the men that are like unto thy husband, and have the single eye to believe and obey the word of the Lord, shall become as princes, dispensing bread to the hungry, and the water of life to them that are athirst; and the beautiful women who fail not but continue faithful, shall be as princesses driving behind white horses and wearing silken robes, and comforting the sick in their sickness, and welcoming the women of the nations as they come from distant lands, teaching them that which is good--" He drew his breath, as if about to say more and yet larger words, but remained silent, looking upon the open s.p.a.ce of the fields. Then his mien, which had become enlarged, contracted somewhat, as if the vision were past.

"Why, Mrs. Halsey, when I do think of it, it seems as if one day at a time were'nt enough, and as if I couldn't just set myself to get the Latin and the Greek, and preach just to a few folks and help a person that's needing a bit of help; but it's borne right in here upon me that what we need is the learning of the world, otherwise called the wisdom of the serpent. I never was a great hand to learn, and father he didn't make me, so it comes harder now; but I'll see to it that the young ones of our folks shall take to learning mighty early; and what we want is to be faithful in small things, and not stumble in our faith if now and then a man do rise into the air."

She felt his blue eyes, mild but shrewd, meeting hers as he came to this last item.

"Sister, 'twas given to me to know the first time as I saw you that there was a great work for you to do in comforting and establis.h.i.+ng the elect, and it comes to me now that you'd better be getting some more education, for although I suffer not a woman to teach, yet she may establish that which is already taught."

Inclined to put some question that would bring out more definite instruction as to her own special function in the Church, she did not notice two men who were approaching from the other side in a gig until they were close upon them.

One of these was a well-to-do farmer, the brother of a woman who had recently been converted at one of Smith's meetings. Now he was breathing out revenge. He sprang to the ground, striking at Smith with a heavy whip. Susannah saw the mildness of the prophet's eye turn into a sharp glitter. She realised that he was not afraid, although when the other man also sprang upon him there was not the least doubt but that he must be worsted in such an a.s.sault.

In the minute that Smith was wrestling with the farmer for the possession of the whip, Susannah wrung her hands in an agony and ran forward toward the hotel, screaming aloud for help; then, afraid of what might befall in her absence, she ran back. By this time the two men had thrown Smith down. Even then he showed his strength, for they struggled hard to get the whip, which he had seized from them.

In her storm of feeling Susannah for the first time came out from the habits of girlish timidity. Hardly knowing what she said, what she was about to say, she heard the words of her own fierce indignation ring out on the air of the mild autumn morning. The scene--the bare road, the sere weeds and gra.s.ses, the prostrate prophet, the flushed faces of the two burly countrymen upturned to hers as they stooped, crus.h.i.+ng him down--all was photographed on her mind by excitement.

By the intensity of her upbraiding she arrested the attention of Smith's enemies for a minute till, as if he revolted against his own weakness, one of them gave vent to a loud jest, at which the other laughed.

The words meant nothing to Susannah, nothing more than the Latin words of the lesson-book that lay torn and muddy at her feet, but Smith no sooner heard them than he hurled himself from the ground with almost superhuman strength.

Both men were forced in self-defence to close upon him. Smith shouted aloud, although a hand on his throat almost choked him, "Go to the hotel, Mrs. Halsey; go in to your husband." Susannah knew now that he was fighting for her, not for himself; the allegiance of his glance gave her a thrill of loyalty to him which was wholly new.

Two men ran out from the hotel, and behind them John Biery. When they neared the place the farmer and his accomplice got into their gig and called back fierce threats against Smith as they went. John Biery was a constable, yet, although he saw that Smith had been brutally a.s.saulted, he made no attempt to pursue and capture the offenders. The other men contented themselves with picking up his hat and book and remarking that the men that had run away hadn't had no sort of right, and that Smith ought to have the law on them. Susannah was the more enraged by this refusal to interfere.

Smith wiped his face from dust and blood. It pleased Susannah's love of dignity to observe that when he spoke it was not in impotent wrath.

"Go in to your husband, Mrs. Halsey, and tell him to rejoice that we are accounted worthy to suffer."

That was not exactly the news that Susannah did bring when she went back to her husband's room. Her feelings were so upwrought that it was some time before, in pouring out to Halsey her indignation, she could find relief. Whatever might or might not be the truth of Smith's heart, it remained true that in this persecution the many were ranged against the few, and were las.h.i.+ng each other on by false reports to lawless brutality. Like the Psalmist, Halsey led her as it were into the house of the Lord, and pointed out the end of the wicked and the award of the righteous. He added to the then popular notion of external reward thoughts which had been working in his own mind under the influence of that time-spirit which leads such minds as his in the foremost paths. He spoke to her of the strength of character gained and lost by all that was done and suffered in the right way or in the wrong.

Susannah was soothed. She knew that the truth was being spoken to her, and her heart leaped forth to do reverence, not only to it, but to the man who could find it in the midst of such insults. Ephraim was good. If he could only know how good Angel was, he would not have asked her to return. All thought of deserting the new cause now was gone; the blood that had trickled from Smith's bruised head, the danger that menaced Halsey, sustained her. She wrote to Ephraim to that effect.

Some days after, when driving past Biery's hotel from a meeting he had been holding in the town of Geneva, Joseph Smith entered and laid before Susannah books for the cultivation of her mind--a Latin grammar and exercise book like his own, a Universal History, and a primer of Natural Philosophy. He told her that in two weeks, when she had mastered their contents, he would bring her others. He left hastily, the business of the Church pressing.

In his idea it seemed that the rudiments of a language would take no longer to acquire than the contents of an English book written in a popular style. The man was very ignorant of the things that most men know, but possibly no other man in the world would have known that writing Latin exercises would bring contentment to Susannah's heart.

There was nothing in such a request to awake suspicion and antagonism, and there was much in the regular mental exercise to keep her mind from brooding on its scepticism or upon Ephraim's kindness. As a child sits down to an intricate game, she sat down, day after day, to her lesson.

Soon the stimulus of knowing that the prophet had actually mastered his grammar in two weeks wrought the determination not to lag very far behind. Her husband, who had had fair schooling, helped her.

There began to be a strange race between the prophet and Susannah for the acquisition of knowledge. They learned out of all sorts of lesson-books, not on any sound principle of work, but with avidity.

Susannah was the only woman in the new sect to whom Joseph Smith gave the commandment to become learned. She was not impervious to this subtle flattery. Rude and poor as he was, Smith was now spiritual dictator to a large number of souls, and she saw that from herself he sometimes asked counsel. Parted from Ephraim, having grown accustomed to a husband with whom self-repression was one of life's first laws, it was not surprising that under Smith's suggestion a new phase of life began in which her understanding, not her heart, developed. "Why believe in Moses and the prophets if not in Smith--in the miracles of yesterday if not in those of to-day?" was the question with which Halsey prefaced the sermons he began to preach. The answer that his logic deduced carried conviction to many of his hearers, but in Susannah's mind the question alone made way.

_BOOK II._

CHAPTER I.

In the next year, 1831, the new church was formally organised, and this was the "revelation" given for her direction by the mouth of Joseph Smith--"And now, behold, I speak unto the Church; thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not lie; thou shalt love thy wife, cleaving unto her and to none else; thou shalt not commit adultery; thou shalt not speak evil of thy neighbour, nor do him any harm. Let him that goeth to the East tell them that shall be converted to flee to the West."

The reports of the first missionaries, who had travelled westward, preaching both to the Indians (called by the "Saints," Lamanites) and to white men, were received in the beginning of this year, and the point designated for the first station of the Church on its way westward was a place called Kirtland, on the banks of the Chagrin River, in northern Ohio. Thither Halsey was sent, having commands to preach by the way.

At Halsey's wayside meetings the old hymns and the old tunes were sung.

The new doctrine embraced all that was supposed to be alive in the old; it repudiated only what was supposed to be dead. It offered that enlargement of human powers which the belief in wonders implies, a new form of church government, a new land to live in, a new hope of a visible and glorious church, and, above all, a living prophet. If the personality of the prophet seemed more attractive to those who believed, not having seen him, to Susannah, who knew the baseness of his origin so well, the sudden increase of his influence over hundreds of people seemed the greatest of marvels; and it was impossible but that even his person should gain some added grace from the reflected light of success.

Halsey was only one of a dozen successful Mormon preachers who were converging with their train of followers upon the first station of the new church.

There is no spot in northern Ohio more lovely than the five hills or bluffs that rise from the banks of the Chagrin River and its tributary brooks twelve miles to the south-east of what is now the city of Cleveland. On the sh.o.r.es of the river and its streams lie green levels; from these the bluffs rise steeply for some one or two hundred feet to tablelands of great fertility.

The site for the first Mormon temple was on the highest of these hills overlooking the three valleys. Its foundations were quickly laid.

Around it upon the slope and tableland, up and down the valleys, and upon the opposite hills, the wooden houses of the converts began to spring up, not unlike in colour to a crop of mushrooms, and very like in the suddenness of their growth.

Not long after Susannah and Halsey had reached Kirtland, Joseph Smith, with a convert named Rigdon, went on, with missionaries who were travelling farther west, in order to find in the wilderness the place that was appointed for the building of Zion or the New Jerusalem. At the same time all those men among the converts who were deemed fit were sent out in couples to preach the new Gospel, some back to the eastern States whence they had come, some to Canada, some to the south. To Joseph Smith it was given to know who was to go and who to stay. Halsey was directed to remain, to receive and establish the new converts who came, to t.i.the their property for the building of the temple, and to found, according to Smith's direction, a school of the prophets.

"And to thy wife, Susannah, it shall be given to teach the children such worldly learning as she has herself acquired, until it may be possible for us to appoint for them a more learned male instructor."

Joseph Smith spoke these words in the room which served him as business office and chapel. He was drawing on his gloves, ready to go forth upon the journey to Missouri.

Several of the elders and their wives were present, some busy on one errand and some on another. Susannah, being with Halsey, received the command in person, although it was not directly addressed to her. She had observed that since her arrival at Kirtland the prophet never addressed himself to her directly when in public. In many ways his manners were becoming gradually more formal, and his relapses into his native speech less frequent.

Susannah could not criticise keenly, so much she marvelled at the man.

His activities before starting on this journey were almost incredible.

Every hour he had made decisions, for the most part successful, concerning the adaptability of men whom he had only seen, for labours of which he knew as little. He had preached continually. He had baptised newcomers in the icy floods of the April stream. He had advised as to the choice of lands and their manner of cultivation, as to the size and form of houses. He had visited the sick and planned merry-makings for the young. In addition to all this, even while preparing for the long journey into an unknown region, he was busy learning three languages, and was laying plans, not only for missionary campaigns that were to spread over the whole earth, but for a new translation of the Old Testament. If the better clothes that he had begun to wear sat somewhat pompously upon him, if his manners now sometimes indicated an attempt not only to be, but to appear, a prophet, such small affectations sank out of sight in the light of such extraordinary ability.

After Smith and Sydney Rigdon had started westward, Susannah went over to console Emma. The prophet's wife was at that time living in a building of which the front part was the general store whence the material needs of the growing church were as far as possible provided.

Susannah pa.s.sed through between bales of cloths, boxes, and barrels of provisions. It was dusk; a young man who served in the store carried a candle before her, and the odd-shaped piles of merchandise threw strange moving shadows upon the low beams of the roof and walls. The young man held the candle to light the way up a straight staircase. "Mis' Smith,"

he shouted, "here's Mis' Halsey come to see you."

At the top of the staircase Susannah was met by a cooing, creeping baby, who beat with its little fist upon a wicket gate fencing off the stair.

"It was the last thing he did before setting out, to nail that gate together and fasten it up with his own hands, so as I wouldn't need always to be running after the young one, lest he should fall down the stair." It was Emma Smith who spoke; she emerged dishevelled and tearful from an upper room. "When he has so much to think about and all, and Elder Rigdon waiting for him at the office till he'd finished. Mr.

Smith, he's always so kind, and he knew as that would be the thing as would give me the most help of anything."

Emma subsided again into tears--tears that were the more touching to Susannah because Emma was not like most women; she seldom wept.

"I don't mean to give way," Emma continued, "but if it was your husband as had gone, you'd know how it was, and it's the first time I've ever been separate from him so long."

Susannah sat down with the child in her arms. When the question was brought home to her she did not believe that temporary separation from Halsey would cause her tears.