Chapter 31

With the jubilant Saints at Quincy the prophet could not remain long. He journeyed up the banks of the Mississippi. Here and there communities of his people welcomed him with touching joy; their numbers and their faithfulness must have raised his heart. He came at last to a poor, sickly locality, around which the great river took a majestic sweep, and here the prophet saw what no one else had seen--a site of great beauty and advantage. The inhabitants were dying of malarial fever. Smith bought their lands at a low price and drained them. Thus arose the beautiful city of Nauvoo.

In the Illinois State Legislature two parties were nearly equal in strength, and both coveted the Mormon vote. When Smith applied for the city charter, for charters also for a university and a force of militia to be called "The Nauvoo Legion," they were granted, and worded to his will.

White limestone, found in great abundance near the surface of the earth, served as material for the public buildings and the better houses. Wooden houses, and even log huts, were washed with white lime. On three sides of the town the air of the beautiful river blew fresh and cool from its rippling tide; the surrounding land was fertile. Fortune certainly smiled upon the sect that had borne itself so sturdily under persecution. The prophet's laws had much to do with the prosperity; neither strong drink nor tobacco were admitted within the city limit; cleanliness and thrift were enforced.

The Saints in settlement in the town of Quincy and other places remained while they could obtain lucrative employment and thus transmit the larger tithes for the building up of their future home; but from the poorer settlements artisans and farmers flocked to Nauvoo. Thither also the missionaries scattered in the eastern States, in England, and in further Europe sent the bands of converts who had been kept waiting till a city of refuge was founded. It was not long, not many months, before fifteen thousand people were hurrying up and down the broad streets of the new city.

During the rise of Nauvoo, Emma Smith was living at Quincy in a small house with her three children. She was Susannah's best neighbour. The prophet's enormous activity was fully occupied with the new city and the care of the scattered Church, so that he could not visit his wife often. Each time he came he sent for Susannah to listen with Emma to the triumphant accounts that he gave of his present successes. He was all aglow with the resurrection of his Church, tender towards its renewed enthusiasm for himself, compassionate more than ever for the pains it had endured; fixed in purpose to establish his suffering and loyal people in such a manner as might reward them for all that they had undergone. His spirit of revenge against the Gentiles, and especially against the perverts from his own sect who had sought to trample it down, was also increased; the prayers of the Hebrew Psalmist against the enemies of Israel were constantly upon his lips. More than once when at Quincy he preached to the little flock there with great effect from the blessings and cursings conditionally delivered to Israel in the Book of Deuteronomy, arguing that evils of a very material kind were to befall apostates, and blessings of a like kind were to be given to the faithful in the new city.

"It is not true," Susannah said to him defiantly. "There is no righteousness in desiring the downfall of your enemies, and earthly wealth can never have any fixed connection with spiritual blessing."

"Do I understand you, my sister, to say that the prophet Moses did not teach a true religion?" As he spoke he laid his hand upon a huge copy of the Bible, bound in velvet and gold, which lay as the only ornament upon Emma's centre table.

In these days Susannah began to have some fear of the word "apostate." Contrary to the freedom which had existed in the Kirtland community, the present Church, with its dogmas cast into iron moulds from the furnace of persecution, had begun to authorise a sentiment against perverts which differed not only in degree, but in kind, from the purely spiritual anathemas which had formerly fallen upon them. Personally she had no fear. The prophet knew of her unbelief, and his conduct was increasingly kind and deferential, but for others she disliked exceedingly the new symptoms of tyranny. Yet it was but natural, she admitted; men who had offered their own lives in sacrifice for a creed were likely to think it of more worth to the soul of another than his liberty. The sin, she thought, lay chiefly with the persecutors.

Sometimes during these visits Smith came and sat beside her in her own small room and talked to her about his plans, about new revelations which had come to him, about the future of the Church, just as if he were trying to persuade himself that she at last believed in the solemn importance of these things. He said to her that her judgment would always weigh greatly with him, that he was reserving a portion for her in the new city such as would have belonged to her husband and child if they had lived. He spoke of his pleasure in seeing the companionship between herself and Emma. He spoke also of Emma's worthiness, and of her devotion to himself.

His words about Emma were kind, but it was not thus that he had spoken of her in the first years. Susannah perceived a change analogous to that which she could not deny had taken place in Emma herself. In the beginning Emma had been slim, with a spiritual look in her eyes, giving herself to absorbed pondering over all Smith's words and ways. Now she was stout, and was given much to the practical care of her children, and, devoted as she was to her husband, she assumed often a tone of remonstrance, setting aside many of Smith's vagaries as unworthy of attention. She thought to please him and his Church by dressing well and appearing to be a person of some figure and consequence, but in private she grumbled at his personal extravagance. At both these changes Susannah smiled, but to her heart, ever weighing the chances in favour of Ephraim's constancy, they seemed an ill omen. It was because she was absorbed in the personal application of all things to her own secret case that she paid less attention to the prophet's remarks.

Once, passing through the street, when she saw him standing with Darling at the door of the tithing office, through which the mail for the Mormon settlement still went and came, she observed the two men were noticing and speaking of her; she received a disagreeable impression from their manner.

She supposed that she had found a complete explanation of this sinister parley when, the next time Smith came, he brought with him an elderly and foolish man, a new convert who had brought great wealth to the new city, whom he proposed as a suitor for Elvira's hand. Susannah was very angry.

Elvira had continued for many months in the lassitude that malarial fever leaves behind it. Susannah had need to support her, as well as herself, by the small fees which her day-scholars could afford. She had had the satisfaction of seeing Elvira restored in a great degree to health, but so capricious and fantastic were the bright little lady's words and actions that it was impossible to say whether or not she had slipped across the wavering line that separates the sane from the insane.

Susannah stood now in her small sitting-room fiercely facing Smith and his new satellite. She still adhered to the plain Quaker-like garb that her husband had liked, and the muslin kerchief crossed upon her breast was a quaint pearl-like frame to the beauty of feature which had slowly but surely, in spite of adverse circumstance, come to its prime. Smith's stalwart figure and the decrepit form of his friend were both clad in sleek broadcloth. They wore the high white collar and stock of the period. In Smith's light hair there was not a gray thread, nor were there many wrinkles in his smooth forceful face. The old man was gray and wrinkled; he cringed and leered as Susannah rated them for the proposition they had made.

But the answer to this proposition did not lie in her hands; before she could compel Smith to withdraw it, or know if his mind was tending towards that obedience, Elvira, curious to see the strangers, entered.

Elvira raised a coquettish finger and told Smith that he was a very naughty man. This was a new freak in her conduct toward the prophet. Light and frivolous as she had become, the title of prophetess, coveted among Mormon women, had been conferred upon her because some strange power of divination governed her freaks.

"A very naughty man." With her delicate prettiness, decked in what gewgaws she could afford, Elvira stood shaking her forefinger. "You don't know why? Oh, fie! you know very well, naughty, naughty creature."

Smith had the air of some unwieldy animal trying to adapt itself to the unexpected gambols of a light one. The first supposition was that Elvira had in some way learnt the object of his mission, so he began to declare it with a reproachful look at Susannah. "Our sister Halsey," he said, "does not wish you to wear jewels and beautiful clothes, and yet it is said in the Scripture that the clothing of ladies should be even of wrought gold."

"Naughty creature," she cried, "don't quote the Scriptures to me. I am not the lady you are thinking about. I am not the lady that you come here to see."

So intent they all were upon her and her affairs that this statement was somewhat puzzling. The only sign that Smith gave that he gathered any sense out of the vivacious nonsense she was pleased to talk was that he precipitated his explanation.

The brother by his side was very rich; it had been foretold him in a vision of the night that when he had professed the Mormon faith a pretty wife would be his reward. Smith had had it borne in upon his mind that Elvira was the lady designed by the vision. "For," said he unctuously; "the Holy Scripture saith that the solitary shall be set in families."

Elvira laughed. "How very amusing," she cried. "And into what family shall our sister Susannah be set?"

Smith frowned. "Our sister Susannah," he said, "is not solitary, but is surrounded by her spiritual children, to whom she imparts her own learning and goodness, to the great benefit of the Church; and I cannot but think, Sister Elvira"--the severity in his voice was growing--"that you are a great care to her, for she toils hard to give you even such poor raiment as you are now wearing, not wishing to accept of the bounty of the Church, while she would be an example of industry to others."

The hard truth of this statement, combined with the commanding voice and manner he now assumed, controlled Elvira. She stood for some minutes meekly contemplating her senile and smirking suitor. Susannah protested and warned her, but in caprice, as sudden as it was unexpected, Elvira decided to comply with the prophet's request without further persuasion or command.

When left alone with Susannah she only shrugged her shoulders and said, "I saw that I should lose my soul if I didn't; the prophet was so determined. Why should we bicker and consider, and why should I fly round and round, like a bird round the green eyes of a cat, or try to escape half a dozen times like a mouse when it is once caught, when I know from the beginning that Joe Smith will curse me if I don't do his will?"

"You are quite mistaken. He was not determined; he told me that he only wished to lay the matter before you and let you decide for yourself."

Elvira let her white eyelids droop until but a narrow slit of the dark eye was visible. "La! child," she said.

"And you cannot seriously think that Smith's curse, even if he were barbarous enough to denounce you, could make the slightest difference to your soul's salvation. You often talk that way, but you cannot seriously think it, Elvira."

But here Susannah struck against a vein of darkness in her companion's mind which it seemed to her had lain there like a black incomprehensible streak since the awful day of anguish and massacre at Haun's Mill.

"Don't speak of it," cried Elvira with a shudder. "Don't you know that Joe Smith is our prophet, and that he holds the keys of life and death? Didn't Angel Halsey die to teach us that? Weren't we baptized into it by being dipped in blood?"

She sat shuddering in the dusk and repeating at intervals "dipped in blood," "dipped in blood."

Whether Elvira was mad or not, Susannah had no power to stop this nefarious marriage. The prophet had departed hastily out of reach of her indignant appeals, and there was no one whose interference she could seek. In vain she besought Elvira, using both argument and passionate entreaty. With precipitate waywardness the strange girl was married by Elder Darling, in the shed of the tithing house.

No letter came from Ephraim Croom or from his friends.

After Elvira's departure Susannah began to save out of her little income, trying to put by enough dollars not only for the eastern journey, but to give her respectable support afterwards until she could obtain employment. She had little heart for the object of her saving; she might, she knew, be going to ignominy and starvation, for with the stigma of Mormonism upon her, she felt that it was unlikely that she would be received with credit in any town where she was friendless and unknown.

Although the community prospered greatly, Smith did not again interfere to increase Susannah's school fees. Emma began to talk largely of the splendour of Nauvoo, reading from her husband's letters of the Nauvoo House, a huge hotel, which was being rapidly and grandly built for the perpetual occupation of himself and family and the entertainment of all such as the Church of the Saints should delight to honour.

Susannah found it hard to understand why Emma was not taken to Nauvoo even before the great house was built for her reception. It was indeed commonly reported among the Gentiles at this time that the prophet had secretly espoused other wives; but a malignant report of this nature, together with accusations of drunkenness and rank dishonesty, had persistently followed the sect from its beginning, and, as far as Susannah knew, were now, as before, totally untrue. This special report, however, reached Emma in an hour of depression, and she came to Susannah for sympathy, shaken with grief and indignation.

"What does it mean that they always say that of him when the one thing that he's done has been to excommunicate any of the brethren that taught any such thing? And there's just been an awful row on in the Council of Nauvoo against Sydney Rigdon and some pamphlet he's written on a doctrine he calls 'Spiritual Wives,' and Joseph has risen up and cast him out, even though he was his best friend."

The reason of the calumny seemed to Susannah clear enough; it was a natural one for low-minded politicians who hated Smith to formulate, and the religious world outside thought they were doing God service by believing any ill of a blasphemer; but this charge was an old one, and she probed further to-day for the real cause of Emma's excitement. She was first given a letter in which Smith told of Rigdon's excommunication.

"Rigdon's doctrine," wrote Smith, "is a vile one because it is held by the whole sect of Perfectionists which are now scattered through the Churches of the eastern States, and is a proof that the glory of the Lord is departed from them, for they say that a man may be married to one wife in an earthly manner, and she who is to be his in a spiritual and eternal manner may be another woman, and this is vile; therefore I've cast out Sydney Rigdon and called him apostate. But it seems to me in this matter and in the perpetual slander of the Gentiles it may be that it is being shown to us, even as things were shown by outward signs at times to the ancient prophets, that there is somewhat concerning the existing form of marriage that it would be well to reconsider, for I perceive that the more my revelations cause a difference to be set between our people and the Gentiles, the more shall we be bound closely together, which unity is undoubtedly of the Lord."

Susannah always found it difficult to gather much information from the prophet's vague and incoherent style. "Has he ever written anything else about this affair of Rigdon's?" she asked.

Then it transpired that another letter had that day arrived, giving another and more graphic account of Rigdon's rebellion and overthrow, after which Joseph inconsistently wrote:

"Yet with regard to the matter of his heresy it remains undoubtedly true for men who are called to some great and special work one woman may be needed as a bride upon earth and another woman may be called as a spiritual bride" (this word "bride" was crossed out, though left legible enough, and "guide" written above it) "to lead him into higher and heavenly places prepared of the Lord for this purpose."

After perusing this passage carefully, and with inward laughter at its inconsistency, she gave the letter back, endeavouring to render some help.

"Have you not observed that your husband's mind is very peculiar? When any idea is forcibly suggested to him, all his thoughts seem to eddy round it until he thinks that the whole world is to be revolutionised by it, and then when diverted to something else he forgets all about it like a child, and never thinks of it again perhaps for years."

Emma, unable to comprehend the analysis, drew back offended.

"Joseph has a great deal finer mind than any person I know." The last words were levelled with a nettled glance at Susannah.

On Emma's behalf Susannah confidently hoped that the prophet would forget this theory, as he had apparently forgotten the many theories which had ere now proposed themselves to his excitable brain, and which he had found unworkable. His practical shrewdness acted as a critic on his visionary notions--never in thought, for he did not seem able to exercise the two phases of his mind at once, but always in practice--and Susannah could not conceive that a new order of marriage would appear feasible, even though it would certainly raise a new barrier around the fold, and in consequence draw its votaries closer together.

Soon after this Emma was greatly comforted by a summons to Nauvoo. She could now enter in triumph upon the more glorious stage of her chequered career.

For a few days Susannah worked on still with a sense of mission towards her pupils, but of necessity also, for her work meant daily bread. It produced little more than that.

But at Nauvoo new schools in emulation of the State schools of other towns had been set up, and now a teacher with certificates of the latest style of education arrived in the Mormon settlement at Quincy, commissioned by the prophet to gather all the Mormon youth there into a new school under the direction of the Church. Susannah's mission and her means of livelihood were alike gone.

The change was made. It was not until Susannah had passed the first desolate day of her dethronement that Darling came to her, sent with profuse apologies from the prophet and the explanation that the chief motive of the change had been to relieve her from labour now that the Church was in a position to offer her adequate support. The message was accompanied by many compliments upon her work and her fidelity, and a document officially signed, in which it was set forth that the part and lot which would have pertained to Halsey in the Holy City was considered as hers; rooms and entertainment at the Nauvoo House were offered. It was handsomely done. Smith in his poverty had been no niggard, and of his wealth he was lavish. The documents explained what rooms, size and position given, should be hers, what furniture at her disposal, what ailment, what allowance from the Treasury for clothing and charity. The scale was magnificent. Darling was also commissioned to offer her a ticket on one of the river boats to Nauvoo, and his own escort. He urged her instant acceptance. Darling had been promoted from his post at Quincy to that of postmaster at Nauvoo, and he could not delay his journey.

Susannah sat long into the night and counted her little hoard, and figured to herself what the long-eastward journey, then a matter of great expense, would cost. Since Elvira left her she had with all her efforts saved hardly fifty dollars. No course lay open to her but to go first to Nauvoo, and there compound with Smith for a sum of money to be given in return for the relinquishment of all further claim upon the Church.

_Book III._