 | CHAPTER IX.
SIZZUM AND HIS HERETICS. John Brent |  |
9. CHAPTER IX.
SIZZUM AND HIS HERETICS.
No sooner had this nomad town settled itself
quietly for the night, than a town-meeting collected
in the open of the amphitheatre.
“Now, brethren,” says Shamberlain to us, “ef
you want to hear exhortin' as runs without stoppin',
step up and listen to the Apossle of the
Gentiles. Prehaps,” and here Jake winked perceptibly,
“you 'll be teched, and want to jine,
and prehaps you wont. Ef you 're docyle you 'll
be teched, ef you 're bulls of Bashan you wont
be teched.”
“How did you happen to be converted yourself,
Jake?” Brent asked. “You 've never told
me.”
“Why, you see I was naturally of a religious
nater, and I 've tried 'em all, but I never fell foul
of a religion that had real proved miracles, till
I seed a man, born dumb, what was cured by
the Prophet Joseph looking down his throat and
tellin' his palate to speak up, — and it did speak
up, did that there palate, and went on talkin' most
suthin like gibberidge; but Joseph said that was
how the tongues sounded in the Apossles' time
to them as had n't got the interruption of tongues.
I struck my flag to that there miracle. I 'd seen
'em gettin' up the sham kind, when I was to the
Italian convent, and I knowed the fourth-proof
article. I may talk rough about this business,
but Brother Brent knows I 'm honest about it.”
Jake led us forward, and stationed us in posts
of honor before the crowd of auditors.
Presently Sizzum appeared. He had taken
time to tone down the pioneer and develop the
deacon in his style, and a very sleek personage
he had made of himself. He was clean shaved;
clean shaving is a favorite coxcombry of the deacon
class. His long black hair, growing rank
from a muddy skin, was sleekly put behind his
ears. A large white blossom of cravat expanded
under his nude, beefy chin, and he wore a black
dress-coat, creased with its recent packing. Except
that his pantaloons were thrust into boots
with the maker's name (Abel Cushing, Lynn,
Mass.) stamped in gold on a scarlet morocco
shield in front, he was in correct go-to-meetin'
costume, — a Chadband of the plains.
He took his stand, and began to fulmine over
the assemblage. His manner was coarse and
overbearing, with intervals of oily persuasiveness.
atom of delicacy in him, — a fellow who never
could take a flower or a gentle heart into his
hand without crushing it by a brutal instinct. A
creature with such an amorphous beak of a nose,
such a heavy-lipped mouth, and such wilderness
of jaw, could never perceive the fine savor of
any delicate thing. Coarse joys were the only
joys for such a body; coarse emotions, the pleasures
of force and domination, the only emotions
crude enough for such a soul.
His voice was as repulsive as his mien and
manner. That badly modelled nose had an important
office in his oratory. Through it he
hailed his auditors to open their hearts, as a
canal-boatman hails the locks with a canal horn
of bassoon calibre. But sometimes, when he
wished to be seductive, his sentences took the
channel of his mouth, and his great lips rolled
the words over like fat morsels. Pah! how the
recollection of the fellow disgusts me! And yet
he had an unwholesome fascination, which compelled
us to listen. I could easily understand
how he might overbear feeble minds, and wheedle
those that loved flattery. He had some education.
Travel had polished his base metal, so
that it shone well enough to deceive the vulgar
or the credulous. He did not often allow himself
the broad coarseness of his brother preachers
in the church.
Shall I let him speak for himself? Does any
one wish to hear the inspirations of the last faith
humanity has chosen for its guide?
No. Such travesty of true religion is very
sorry comedy, very tragical farce. Vulgar rant
and cant, and a muddle of texts and dogmas, are
disgusting to hear, and would be weariness to
repeat.
Sizzum's sermon suited his mixed character.
He was Aaron and Joshua, high-priest and captain
combined. He made his discourse bulletin
for to-day, general orders for to-morrow. He
warned against the perils of disobedience. He
raved of the joys and privileges of Latter-Day
Saintship on earth and in heaven. He heaped
vindictive and truculent anathemas upon Gentiles.
He gave his audience to understand that
he held the keys of the kingdom; if they yielded
to him without question, they were safe in life
and eternity; if they murmured, they were cast
into outer darkness. It was terrible to see the
man's despotism over his proselytes. A rumble
of Amens from the crowd greeted alike every
threat and every promise.
Sizzum's discourse lasted half an hour. He
dismissed his audience with an Amen, and an injunction
to keep closer to the train on the march
to-morrow, and not be “rabbling off to catch
grasshoppers because they were bigger and handsomer
than the Lancashire kind.”
“And this is one of the religions of the nineteenth
century, and such a man is its spokesman,”
said Brent to me, as the meeting broke
up, and we strolled off alone to inspect the camp.
“It is a shame to all churches that they have
not trained men to judge of evidence, and so
rendered such a delusion impossible.”
“But Christianity tolerates, and ever reveres,
myths and mythic histories; and such toleration
and reverence offer premiums on the invention
of new mythologies like this.”
“We, in our churches, teach that phenomena
can add authority to truth; we necessarily
invite miracle-mongers, Joe Smiths, Pio Nonos,
to produce miracles to sustain lies.”
“I suppose,” said Brent, “that superstition
must be the handmaid of religion, except in
minds very holy, or very brave and thorough
in study. By and by, when mankind is educated
to know that theology is a science, to be
investigated and tested like a science, Mormonism
and every like juggle will become forever
impossible.”
“Certainly; false religions always pretend to
a supernatural origin and a fresh batch of mysteries.
Let Christianity discard its mysteries,
and impostors will have no educated credulity
to aid them.”
So Brent and I commented upon the Sizzum
system, and were disgusted with its apostle, as
a tempter and a knave. Yet we could not feel
any close personal interest in the class he deluded.
They seemed too ignorant and doltish
to need purer spiritual food.
Bodily food had been prepared by the women
while the men listened to Sizzum's grace before
meat. A fragrance of baking bread had pervaded
the air. A thousand slices of fat pork
sizzled in two hundred frying-pans, and water
boiled for two hundred coffee or tea pots. Saints
cannot solely live on sermons.
Brent and I walked about to survey the camp.
We stopped wherever we found the emigrants
sociable, and chatted with them. They were
all eager to know how much length of journey
remained.
“We 're comin' to believe, some of us,” said
an old crone, with a wrinkle for every grumble
of her life, “that we 're to be forty year in the
wilderness, like the old Izzerullites. I would n't
have come, Samwell, if I 'd known what you was
bringin' me to.”
“There 's a many of us would n't have come,
mother,” rejoined “Samwell,” a cowed man of
anxious look, “if we 'd known as much as we
do now.”
Samwell glanced sadly at his dirty, travel-worn
His dowdy wife broke off the colloquy
by announcing, in a tone that she must have
learned from a rattlesnake, that the loaf was
baked, the bacon was fried, and supper should n't
wait for anybody's talking.
All the emigrants were English. Lancashire
their accent and dialect announced, and Lancashire
they told us was their home in the old
step-mother country.
Step-mother, indeed, to these her children!
No wonder that they had found life at home intolerable!
They were the poorest class of townspeople
from the great manufacturing towns, —
penny tradesmen, indoor craftsmen, factory operatives,
— a puny, withered set of beings; hardly
men, if man means strength; hardly women,
if woman means beauty. Their faces told of
long years passed in the foul air of close shops,
or work-rooms, or steamy, oily, flocculent mills.
All work and no play had been their history.
No holidays, no green grass, no flowers, no freshness,
— nothing but hard, ill-paid drudgery, with
starvation standing over the task and scourging
them on. There were children among them already
aged and wrinkled, ancient as the crone,
Samwell's mother, for any childish gayety they
showed. Poor things! they had been for years
their twelve, fourteen, sixteen hours at work in
in the hay, chasing butterflies, expanding
to sunshine and open air.
“We have not seen,” said Brent, “one hearty
John Bull, or buxom Betsy Bull, in the whole
caravan.”
“They look as if husks and slops had been
their meat and drink, instead of beef and beer.”
“Beef and beer belong to fellows that have
red in their cheeks and guffaws in their throats,
not to these lean, pale, dreary wretches.”
“The saints' robes seem as sorry as their persons,”
said I. “No watchman on the hill-tops of
their Sion will hail, `Who are these in bright
array?' when they heave in sight!”
“They have a right to be way-worn, after their
summer of plodding over these dusty wastes.”
“Here comes a group in gayer trim. See!
— actually flounces and parasols!”
Several young women of the Blowsalind order,
dressed in very incongruous toggery of stained
and faded silks, passed us. They seemed to be
on a round of evening visits, and sheltered their
tanned faces against the October sunshine with
ancient fringed parasols. Their costume had a
queer effect in the camp of a Mormon caravan at
Fort Bridger. They were in good spirits, and
went into little panics when they saw Brent in
his Indian rig, and then into “Lor me!” and
to be a handsome pale-face.
“Perhaps we waste sympathy,” said Brent,
“on these people. Why are not they better off
here, and likely to be more comfortable in Utah
than in the slums of Manchester?”
“Drudgery for drudgery, slavery for slavery,
barren as the Salt Lake country is, and rough
the lot of pioneers, I have no doubt they will be.
But then the religion!”
“I do not defend that; but what has England's
done for them to make them regret it? Of what
use to these poor proletaires have the cathedrals
been, or the sweet country churches, or the quiet
cloisters of Oxford and Cambridge? I cannot
wonder that they have given an easy belief to
Mormonism, — an energetic, unscrupulous propagandism,
offering escape from poverty and social
depression, offering acres for the mere trouble
of occupying; promising high thrones in heaven,
and on earth also, if the saints will only gather,
march back, and take possession of their old estates
in Illinois and Missouri.”
We had by this time approached the upper
end of the ellipse. Sizzum, as quartermaster,
had done his duty well. The great blue land-arks,
each roofed with its hood of white canvas
stretched on hoops, were in stout, serviceable order,
wheels, axles, and bodies.
Within these nomad cottages order or chaos
reigned, according to the tenants. Some people
seem only to know the value of rubbish. They
guard old shoes, old hats, cracked mugs, battered
tins, as articles of virtu. Some of the wagons
were crowded with such cherished trash. Some
had been lightened of such burdens by the wayside,
and so were snug and orderly nestling-places;
but the rat's-nests quite outnumbered
the wren's-nests.
A small, neat wagon stood near the head of
the train. We might have merely glanced at it,
and passed by, as we had done elsewhere along
the line; but, as we approached, our attention
was caught by Murker and Larrap. They were
nosing about, prying into the wagon, from a little
distance. When they caught sight of us, they
turned and skulked away.
“What are those vermin about?” said Brent.
“Selecting, perhaps, a Mormoness to kidnap
to-night, or planning a burglary.”
“I hate to loathe any one as I loathe those
fellows. I have known brutes enough in my
life to have become hardened or indifferent by
this time, but these freshen my disgust every
time I see them.”
“I thought we had come to a crisis with them
this afternoon, when you collared Larrap.”
“You remember my presentiments about them
yet serve us a shabby trick. Their `dixonary,'
as Shamberlain called it, of rascality is an unabridged
edition.”
“Such carrion creatures should not be allowed
about such a pretty cage.”
“It is, indeed, a pretty cage. Some neater-handed
Phyllis than we have seen has had the
arranging of the household gear within.”
“Yes; the mistress of this rolling mansion has
not lost her domestic ambition. This is quite
the model wagon of the train. Refinement does
not disdain Sizzum's pilgrims; as ecce signum
here!”
“The pretty cage has its bird, — pretty too,
perhaps. See! there is some one behind that
shawl screen at the back of the wagon.”
“The bird has divined Murker and Larrap,
and is hiding, probably.”
“Come; we have stared long enough; let us
walk on.”
| CHAPTER IX.
SIZZUM AND HIS HERETICS. John Brent | |