The Mississippi was filled with large cakes of floating ice. Another
company which had gone out from Far West some weeks before was still
encamped on the Missouri banks of the river. Yet other companies from
Far West came up before the main body of the Saints with which Susannah
had travelled was able to cross. The surrounding woods were cut down to
make shanties; the surrounding country was scoured for food. In the
intervening weeks, while they lay encamped on the banks, the last enemy
to be vanquished in that region, the malarial fever, grappled with the
sect and dealt deadly wounds. Illinois, shocked by the cruelty of her
sister State, held out kind hands and fed the fugitives to some extent,
and when April came, helped them to cross the river.
Elvira had been ill in one of the women's sheds, now shrieking in hot
delirium, now shaken with ague as if by a strong beast that worried its
prey. When they at last crossed the river to the city of Quincy,
Susannah was established with her charge, the one legacy of relationship
Halsey had left her, in a meagre home with some of the Saints who
already lived there.
Within a few days Susannah went to the tithing office, which had been
swiftly established for the relief of the destitute Saints, and asked
for paper on which she could write a letter. It was her first chance,
since leaving her last asylum, of writing the proposed letter to Ephraim
Croom. Elder Darling was officiating. She fancied that he looked at her
with rude curiosity.
Until this moment she had presented so sad an exterior, had seemed so
indifferent to all the ills of their common lot, that Darling and the
other men who had dealings with her had stood not a little in awe. As
outward physical details of suffering always appeal more largely to
common sympathy than inward grief, the manner of her loss had set a
temporary crown upon her head, to which the elders had knelt, refusing
to admonish her because she took no part in their public services, or
because, except for attention to the sick, she did not give much sign of
social comradeship.
Now when she asked for the paper, Darling felt that the ice was
beginning to break, and gave what seemed to him genial encouragement.
"First time that you've asked for anything but daily rations, Sister
Halsey; glad to see you plucking up heart. The living God giveth us all
things richly to enjoy." He repeated the last words in an unctuous
drawl while he was looking for the paper, "richly to--enjoy. Well now, I
was thinking we had some with a black border on it, but you're more than
welcome to such as there is."
The stores indeed were scanty enough; food, cloth, household utensils, a
little stationery, a large pile of devotional books, were arranged in
meagre order in the shed used as a warehouse. Darling had as yet
scarcely respectable clothes to wear, but Susannah was astonished only
at the energy that had in a few days collected so much, at the order and
patient kindliness which ruled in this poverty-stricken administration.
Already those who could work paid into the common store, and those who
had lost all had but to state their needs to have them supplied as well
as might be.
"One, two, three--will three sheets be enough, Sister Halsey? You've
been hearing, I suppose, that Mr. Smith is going to be moved to the town
of Boome, and that he is going to be allowed to get his letters now?
He'd be real cheered to hear from you, although"--he added this with
decent haste--"it will be a great grief to him to hear of your loss!"
"Is he well?" she asked.
"The State authorities are in a fine to-do about him, I suppose you
know, sister, for they can't find a single charge to bring him to trial
on. You bet the trial would have been on long ago if they'd had a
single leg to stand on. Anything else that I can serve you with to-day?
We've got some new women's shawls and hats come in. Won't you just step
here and have a look at them? No? Well, next time; but there ain't one
of our women as doesn't want one of them new bonnets."
Susannah went out into the spring on the outskirts of the town. The
birds were singing; everywhere the dandelions swelled out their happy
tufted breasts to the sunshine; even a long worm that she noticed
crawling lazily in the heat spoke to her of enjoyment of some sort. Her
own heart leaped, and she thought it was in answer to the spring. She
forgot the dire fates with which she had been grappling, forgot to hate
and to grieve.
In the small wooden room that she shared with Elvira, while the invalid
slept, she wrote to Ephraim, telling him all that had befallen her. She
confessed to Ephraim the passion of hatred which had long tormented her,
but she added, "To-day I do not feel it; to-day, with the sweet voices
of the birds everywhere in my ears, I feel that if I could be beside you
again you could teach me to forgive as my husband forgave, for I do know
to-day that in forgiveness alone is the true triumph, the only healing.
I am more one with my husband's sect now than I ever was in heart and
hope. I long to see it triumphant; I long to see its enemies abashed;
but I will leave this people and come back to you, if you will have me,
for with regard to their religious faith my life with them is a lie."
The writing took so long that when she carried the letter again to the
tithing office to be stamped and sent, the post-bag of that day had
already gone. Later, when the office was closed to the public and Elder
Darling was alone, he took up the letter which Susannah had brought and
looked at it curiously. His eyes had caught the address. He was not sure
that he would have put it in the bag even if it had been in time, and
now it was clearly his duty to consider. His was a mind in which there
was no place for platonic friendship, and Susannah was obviously a most
desirable piece of property to the struggling Church. The Church had
provided the paper for this letter, must needs provide the stamp; he was
officially responsible to the Church. The elder had been an honest man
according to the average notions of honesty until within the last weeks,
when stress of circumstance had made him reconsider, not for himself but
for others, more than one rule of life, and obtain larger latitude. The
building up of the Church in her present sore strait was surely an end
to override small scruples. He acted now as an official, as a priest,
when, after a good many painful qualms of conscience, he opened the
letter. After having read its contents, he became convinced that it was
for the good of Susannah's own soul that it should not go.
The ground about Quincy had been drained; the town was comparatively
healthy; in a few days more some two thousand of the fugitives felt
again the pulse of life in their veins. Then they looked abroad and
clasped every man the hand of his neighbour, and said "Thanks be to
God," and even embraced one another in the joy of relief. History often
shows how exuberant is the joy of human nature at escape, and that the
impulse of joy is almost one with the impulse of affection. At the
abatement of the London plague we see Britons kiss each other in the
streets, and at the relief of besieged towns, in our own day, staid
persons have caressed one another, unmindful of what they did. So it was
now with the members of this driven sect. The spirit of joy and a closer
bond of affection went infectiously through the gathering Church. Upon
the first Sunday they met together in the open air, and sang words that
they verily believed had been written in particular prophecy for
themselves at this very hour.
"If it had not been the Lord that was on our side."
The psalm rose from every throat with the swelling tide of joy.
"If it had not been the Lord that was on our side when men rose up
against us."
Susannah, advancing, a little belated, to the rural preaching which was
held in a dip of the plain, heard the lusty chant of irrepressible
gladness rising to the blue heavens, and quickened her steps. In spite
of herself she was carried into song by the enthusiasm which seemed to
dart like a flame from the assembled multitude and enveloped her.
"Blessed be the Lord who hath not given us as a prey to their
teeth. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the
fowler: the snare is broken, and we are escaped. Our help is in the
name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth."
While she was exalted by the song she saw the face of her friend the
Danite for the first time since the night on which they had ridden so
far together. He was standing now upon the outskirts of the crowd as one
who had newly come from a solitary journey. When he met Susannah's eye
his solitary look passed into one of lofty and intense comradeship. He
ran to her and embraced her, and emptied an inner pocket of a purse of
money which he thrust eagerly into her possession.
"I have killed one of them," he said, speaking eagerly, as a child tells
of some exploit. "His pockets were fat with money, and it is yours."
"See!" He took the fragment of linen upon which the stain of Halsey's
blood had turned dark with time, and showed her a new and brighter stain
upon its edges.
All around them were men and women, who now, for the first time since
the hour of some terrible parting, spied kindred or comrades. By a
common impulse these moved toward one another, and there was an
interlude in the service for sobs of joy and frantic embracings, and
many men and women clasped one another who could claim no kindred, and
none forbade, for tears of mutual love were in all eyes.
After that, in the streets or in chance meetings in the houses, the
remembrance of this festival of rapturous comradeship gave a new
standard to the manners of private life. The Saints had, as it were,
passed from death unto life; former things had passed away; the praises
of God were ever upon their lips; they entered with joy into a kingdom
of love which they doubted not God had ordained for his elect; many a
command of Scripture became illumined with a new practical meaning.
"Greet _all_ the brethren with a holy kiss." "Greet ye one another with
a kiss of charity."
Susannah was not much abroad, but she saw the new customs inaugurated.
Believing that they must be transient, knowing, too, that the fierce
undercurrent that they expressed must have outlet, and was not of that
range of emotions which had to do with the common relationships of life,
she felt no shock of offended sentiment. But in a short space of time,
as Elvira grew better, Susannah perceived that the experimental nature
of the new life was a dissipation to weaker minds. This grieved her
because of the sacred memory of her husband's efforts for these people,
and because, attuned by party spirit, she entertained a nervous
personal desire that they should acquit themselves well. Just here she
found occupation; she gathered the young girls about her in a temporary
school, and set herself to soothe and calm the excitement of the women.
The work was intended to last but a few weeks, until Ephraim's answer
came.
To the unspeakable joy of his followers, Joseph Smith appeared suddenly
in Quincy. It appeared to be true, as Darling said, that the Missouri
authorities could in fact find no charge on which to try him.
Smith, with his brother Hyrum and their fellows, had suffered severely,
but later their confinement had been more easy, and the news of the
triumphant gathering of his people, together with the excitement of the
escape, had induced in Smith a mood which spurned past failures with a
foot that sped to a new goal. The acclamation, the sincere and touching
joy, with which Smith was received by men and women and children, were
enough to raise any man in his own esteem, and to set free the ambition
which had been perhaps drooping in confinement.
Smith had not been in Quincy twenty-four hours before he mastered the
situation there in all its details. He promptly sent out a decree
against the new doctrine of what he called "lax manners." He preached a
great sermon in the open air that night. "A man shall kiss his own wife
and daughters and no other women," said Smith. The elders who had
preached from St. Paul's texts on the subject were accused of error and
called upon to recant. Smith commanded that the women should work and
the children should study, and he publicly pronounced Susannah to be a
fitting model for the women and a fitting teacher for the young.
Susannah had not as yet met Smith face to face when she found herself
made, as it were, an object of licensed admiration.