_How the World Did not Come to an End_
In doubt and fear, the phantom of a dreadful certainty creeping always
closer, the final years went by. When the world came to be in its very
last days, when the little bent man was drooping lower than ever, and
Prudence was seventeen, there came another Prince of Israel to save her
into the Kingdom while there was yet a time of grace. On this occasion
the suitor was no less a personage than Bishop Warren Snow, a holy man
and puissant, upon whom the blessed Gods had abundantly manifested their
favour. In wives and children, in flocks and herds, he was rich; while,
as to spiritual worth, had not that early church poet styled him the
Entablature of Truth?
But Prudence Rae, once so willing to be saved by the excellent Wild Ram
of the Mountains, had fled in laughing confusion from this later
benefactor, when he had made plain one day the service he sought to do
her soul. A moment later he had stood before her father in all his years
of patriarchal dignity, hale, ruddy, and vast of girth.
"She's a woman now, Brother Snow,--free to choose for herself," the
father had replied to his first expostulations.
"Counsel her, Brother Rae." In the mind of the Bishop, "counsel,"
properly applied, was a thing not long to be resisted.
"She would treat my counsel as shortly as she treated your proposal,
Brother Snow."
The Entablature of Truth glanced out of the open door to where Tom
Potwin could be seen, hastening importantly upon his endless and
mysterious errands, starting off abruptly a little way, stopping
suddenly, with one hand raised to his head, as if at that instant
remembering a forgotten detail, and then turning with new impetus to
walk swiftly in the opposite direction.
"There ain't any one else after her, is there, Brother Rae,--any of
these young boys?"
"No, Bishop--no one."
"Well, if there is, you let me know. I'll be back again, Brother Rae.
Meantime, counsel her--counsel her with authority."
The Entablature of Truth had departed with certain little sidewise
noddings of his head that seemed to indicate an unalterable purpose.
The girl came to her father, blushing and still laughing confusedly,
when the rejected one had mounted his horse and ridden away.
"Oh, Daddy, how funny!--to think of marrying him!"
He looked at her anxiously. "But you wanted to marry Bishop Wright--at
least, you--"
She laughed again. "How long ago--years ago--I must have been a baby."
"You were old enough to point out that he would save you in the
after-time."
"I remember; I could see myself sitting by him on a throne, with the
Saints all around us on other thrones, and the Gentiles kneeling to
serve us. We were in a big palace that had a hundred closets in it, and
in every closet there hung a silk dress for me--a hundred silk dresses,
each a different colour, waiting for me to wear them."
"But have you thought sufficiently--now? The time is short. Bishop Snow
could save you."
"Yes--but he would kiss me--he wanted to just now." She put both hands
over her mouth, with a mocking little grimace that the Entablature of
Truth would not have liked to see.
"He would be certain to exalt you."
She took the hands away long enough to say, "He would be certain to kiss
me."
"You may be lost."
"I'd _rather_!"
And so it had ended between them. Ever since a memorable visit to Salt
Lake City, where she had gone to the theatre, she had cherished some
entirely novel ideas concerning matrimony. In that fairyland of delights
she had beheld the lover strangely wooing but one mistress, the husband
strangely cherishing but one wife. There had been no talk of "the
Kingdom," and no home portrayed where there were many wives. That lover,
swearing to cherish but one woman for ever, had thrilled her to new
conceptions of her own womanhood, had seemed to meet some need of her
own heart that she had not until then been conscious of. Ever after, she
had cherished this ideal of the stage, and refused to consider the
other. Yet she had told her father nothing of this, for with her
womanhood had come a new reserve--truths half-divined and others clearly
perceived--which she could not tell any one.
He, in turn, now kept secret from her the delight he felt at her
refusal. He had tried conscientiously to persuade her into the path of
salvation, when his every word was a blade to cut at his heart. Nor was
he happy when she refused so definitely the saving hand extended to her.
To know she was to come short of her glory in the after-time was anguish
to him; and mingling with that anguish, inflaming and aggravating it,
were his own heretical doubts that would not be gone.
In a sheer desperation of bewilderment he longed for the end, longed to
know certainly his own fate and hers--to have them irrevocably fixed--so
that he might no more be torn among many minds, but could begin to pay
his own penalties in plain suffering, uncomplicated by this torturing
necessity to choose between two courses of action.
And the time was, happily, to be short. With the first day of 1870 he
began to wait. With prayer and fasting and vigils he waited. Now was
the day when the earth should be purified by fire, the wicked swept from
the land, and the lost tribes of Israel restored to their own. Now was
to come the Son of Man who should dwell in righteousness with men,
reigning over them on the purified earth for a thousand years.
He watched the mild winter go, with easy faith; and the early spring
come and go, with a dawning uneasiness. For the time was passing with
never the blast of a trumpet from the heavens. He began to see then that
he alone, of all Amalon, had kept his faith pure. For the others had
foolishly sown their fields, as if another crop were to be
harvested,--as if they must continue to eat bread that was earth-grown.
Even Prudence had strangely ceased to believe as he did. Something from
the outside had come, he knew not what nor how, to tarnish the fair gold
of her certainty. She had not said so, but he divined it when he
shrewdly observed that she was seeking to comfort him, to support his
own faith when day after day the Son of Man came not.
"It will surely be in another month, Daddy--perhaps next week--perhaps
to-morrow," she would say cheerfully. "And you did right not to put in
any crops. It would have been wicked to doubt."
He quickly detected her insincerity, seeing that she did not at all
believe. As the summer came and went without a sign from the heavens,
she became more positive and more constant in these assurances. As the
evening drew on, they would walk out along the unsown fields, now grown
rankly to weeds, to where the valley fell away from their feet to the
west. There they could look over line after line of hills, each a little
dimmer as it lay farther into the blue through which they saw it, from
the bold rim of the nearest shaggy-sided hill to the farthest feathery
profile all but lost in the haze. Day after day they sat together here
and waited for the sign,--for the going down of the sun upon a night
when there should be no darkness; when the light should stay until the
sun came back over the eastern verge; when the trumpet should wind
through the hills, and when the little man's perplexities, if not his
punishment, should be at an end.
And always when the dusk came she would try to cheer him to new hope for
the next night, counting the months that remained in the year, the
little time within which the great white day _must_ be. Then they would
go back through the soft light of the afterglow, he with his bent
shoulders and fallen face, shrunk and burned out, except for the eyes,
and she in the first buoyant flush of her womanhood, free and strong and
vital, a thing of warmth and colour and luring curve, restraining her
quick young step to his, as she suppressed now a world of strange new
fancies to his soberer way of thought. When they reached home again, her
words always were: "Never mind, Daddy--it must come soon--there's only
a little time left in the year."
It was on these occasions that he knew she was now the stronger, that he
was leaning on her, had, in fact, long made her his support--fearfully,
lest she be snatched away. And he knew at last that another change had
come with her years; that she no longer confided in him unreservedly, as
the little child had. He knew there were things now she could not give
him. She communed with herself, and her silences had come between them.
She looked past him at unseen forms, and listened as if for echoes that
she alone could hear, waiting and wanting, knowing not her wants--yet
driven to aloofness by them from the little bent man of sorrows, whose
whole life she had now become.
His hope lasted hardly until the year ended. Before the time was over,
there had crept into his mind a conviction that the Son of Man would not
come; that the Lord's favour had been withdrawn from Israel. He knew the
cause,--the shedding of innocent blood. They might have made war;
indeed, many of the revelations to Joseph discriminated even between
murder and that murder in which innocent blood should be shed; but the
truth was plain. They had shed innocent blood that day in the Meadows.
Now the Lord's favour was withdrawn and His coming deferred, perhaps
another thousand years. The torture of the thing came back to him with
all its early colouring, so that his days and nights were full of
anguish. He no longer dared open the Bible to that reddened page. The
cries already rang in his ears, and he knew not what worse torture might
come if he looked again upon the stain; nor could he free himself from
these by the old expedient of prayer, for he could no longer pray with
an honest heart; he was no longer unselfish, could no longer kneel in
perfect submission; he was wholly bound to this child of her mother, and
the peace of absolute and utter sacrifice could not come back to him.
Full of unrest, feeling that somehow the end, at least for him, could
not be far off, he went north to the April Conference. He took Prudence
with him, not daring to leave her behind.
She went with high hopes, alive with new sensations. Another world lay
outside her valley of the mountains, and she was going to peep over the
edge at its manifold fascinations. She had been there before as a child;
now she was going as a woman. She remembered the city, bigger and
grander than fifty Amalons, with magnificent stores filled with exotic
novelties and fearsome luxuries from the land of the wicked Gentile. She
recalled even the strange advertisements and signs, from John and Enoch
Reese, with "All necessary articles of comfort for the wayfarer, such as
flour, hard bread, butter, eggs and vinegar, buckskin pants and
whip-lashes," to the "Surgeon Dentist from Berlin and Liverpool," who
would "Examine and Extract Teeth, besides keeping constantly on hand a
supply of the Best Matches, made by himself." From William Hennefer,
announcing that, "In Connection with my Barber Shop, I have just opened
an Eating House, where Patrons will be Accommodated with every Edible
Luxury the Valley Affords," to William Nixon, who sold goods for cash,
flour, or wheat "at Jacob Hautz's house on the southeast corner of
Council-House Street and Emigration Square, opposite to Mr. Orson
Spencer's."
She remembered the hunters and trappers in bedraggled buckskin, the
plainsmen with revolvers in their belts, wearing the blue army cloak,
the teamsters in leathern suits, and horsemen in fur coats and caps,
buffalo-hide boots with the hair outside, and rolls of blankets behind
their high Mexican saddles.
More fondly did she recall two wonderful evenings at the theatre. First
had been the thrilling "Robert Macaire," then the romantic "Pizarro," in
which Rolla had been a being of such overwhelming beauty that she had
felt he could not be of earth.
This time her visit was an endless fever of discovery in a realm of
magic and mystery, of joys she had supposed were held in reserve for
those who went behind the veil. It was a new and greater city she came
to now, where were buildings of undreamed splendour, many of them
reaching dizzily three stories above the earth. And the shops were more
fascinating than ever. She still shuddered at the wickedness of the
Gentiles, but with a certain secret respect for their habits of luxury
and their profusion of devices for adornment.
And there were strange new faces to be seen, people surely of a
different world, of a different manner from those she had known,
wearing, with apparent carelessness, garments even more strangely
elegant than those in the shop windows, and speaking in strange, soft
accents. She was told that these were Gentiles, tourists across the
continent, who had ventured from Ogden to observe the wonders of the new
Zion. The thought of the railroad was in itself thrilling. To be so near
that wonderful highway to the land of the evil-doers and to a land,
alas! of so many strange delights. She shuddered at her own wickedness,
but fell again and again, and was held in bondage by the allurements
about her. So thrilled to her soul's center was she that the pleasure of
it hurt her, and the tears would come to her eyes until she felt she
must be alone to cry for the awful joy of it.
The evening brought still more to endure, for they went to the play. It
was a play that took her out of herself, so that the crowd was lost to
her from the moment the curtain went up in obedience to a little bell
that tinkled mysteriously,--either back on the stage or in her own
heart, she was not sure which.
It was a love story; again that strangely moving love of one man for one
woman, that seemed as sweet as it was novel to her. But there was war
between the houses in the play, and the young lover had to make a way
to see his beloved, climbing a high wall into her garden, climbing to
her very balcony by a scarf she flung down to him. To the young woman
from Amalon, these lovers' voices came with a strange compulsion, so
that they played with her heart between them. She was in turn the youth,
pleading in a voice that touched every heart string from low to high;
then she was the woman, soft and timid, hesitating in moments of
delicious doubt, yet almost fearful of her power to resist,
--half-wishing to be persuaded, half-frightened lest she yield.
When the moment of surrender came, she became both of them; and, when
they parted, it was as if her heart went in twain, a half with each,
both to ache until they were reunited. Between the acts she awoke to
reality, only to say to herself: "So much I shall have to think
about--so much--I shall never be able to think about it enough."
Feverishly she followed the heart-breaking tragedy to its close,
suffering poignantly the grief of each lover, suffering death for each,
and feeling her life desolated when the end came.
But then the dull curtain shut her back into her own little world, where
there was no love like that, and beside the little bent man she went out
into the night.
The next morning had come a further delight, an invitation to a ball
from Brigham. Most of the day was spent in one of the shops, choosing a
gown of wondrous beauty, and having it fitted to her.
[Illustration: FULL OF ZEST FOR THE MEASURE AS ANY YOUTH]
When she looked into the little cracked mirror that night, she saw a
strange new face and figure; and, when she entered the ballroom, she
felt that others noted the same strangeness, for many looked at her
until she felt her cheeks burn. Then Brigham arose from a sofa, where he
had been sitting with his first wife and his last. He came gallantly
toward her; Brigham, whom she knew to be the most favoured of God on
earth and the absolute ruler of all the realm about her--an affable,
unpretentious yet dignified gentleman of seventy, who took her hand
warmly in both his own, looked her over with his kindly blue eyes, and
welcomed her to Zion in words of a fatherly gentleness. Later, when he
had danced with some of his wives, Brigham came to dance with her, light
of foot and full of zest for the measure as any youth.
Others danced with her, but during it all she kept finding herself back
before the magic square that framed the land where a man loved but one
woman. She remembered that Brigham sat with four of his wives in one of
the boxes, enthusiastically applauding that portrayal of a single love.
As the picture came back to her now, there seemed to have been something
incongruous in this spectacle. She observed the seamed and hardened
features of his earliest wife, who kept to the sofa during the evening,
beside the better favoured Amelia, whom the good man had last married,
and she thought of his score or so of wives between them.
Then she knew that what she had seen the night before had been the
truth; that she could love no man who did not love her alone. She tried
to imagine the lover in the play going from balcony to balcony, sighing
the same impassioned love-tale to woman after woman; or to imagine him
with many wives at home, to whom would be taken the news of his death in
the tomb of his last. So she thought of the play and not of the ball,
stepping the dances absently, and, when it was all over, she fell
asleep, rejoicing that, before their death, the two dear lovers had been
sealed for time and eternity, so that they could awaken together in the
Kingdom.
They went home the next day, driving down the valley that rolled in
billows of green between the broken ranges of the Wasatch and the
Oquirrh. It was no longer of the Kingdom she thought, nor of Brigham and
his wives; only of a clean-limbed youth in doublet and hose, a plumed
cap, and a silken cloak, who, in a voice that brought the tears back of
her eyes, told of his undying love for one woman--and of the soft,
tender woman in the moonlight, who had trusted him and let herself go to
him in life and in death.
The world had not ended. She thought that, in truth, it could not have
ended yet; for had she not a life to live?