The Red Book Magazine/Volume 6/Number 5/The Girl from Salt Lake

by William MacLeod Raine

The Girl From Salt Lake

BY WILLIAM MAC LEOD RAINE

Burton, giving an alternate cursory inattention to the magazine he held listlessly and to the scenery, was acutely conscious of the presence of the girl in section 8 with the fine powdered freckles. She had got on the train at Denver, as he had, and when the conductor made his round of ticket inspection the alert young man in No. 7 had discovered that her destination, too, was Salt Lake. “'What gilt-edged luck!” he had mentally congratulated himself.

That had been five hours earlier and he had not yet found his chance to offer the preliminary courtesy that would justify a train acquaintaince. He looked not often at her, and never except in a sweeping inclusive glance, but he saw nothing else.

Her warm brown waving hair, mellow with gold when the sunlight caught it, her lucent eyes, shy and unsophisticated; her sweet supple slimness, lithe and graceful in the neat traveling dress; some indefinable note of sadness incongruous with a youth so generously endowed: all contributed to the appeal she made on his imagination. He felt that here behind the beauty was soul, though still largely undeveloped.

Colorado Springs, Pueblo, and Cañon City had all dropped behind them, and the train was now climbing the great continnental divide, driving forward deeper into the golden West. Then Burton's opportunity made itself. The mellow voice of the porter wafted it to him. “Just enterin' the Royal Gorge. Best view of the scenery on the left hand side of the cah.”

The girl hesitated to accept Burton's proffer of his seat. She was plainly embarassed. The pink and white ebbed and flowed beautifully in her cheeks. “I have seen such things before. Mountain travel is an old story with me,” he hastened to add.

“But I don't like to drive you away,” she said, wavering, in a shy voice clear as a bell.

“Then I'll take the other window seat if you don't mind,” he proposed.

Next instant they were both apparently absorbed in the impressive grandeur of the cañon wall towering above them.

“Imposing, isn't it?” said Burton at last.

The girl nodded, coloring. His least word seemed to embarass her. It was plain that she was unused to travel and that it would be easy to shake her confidence in her behavior.

Burton continued in a monologue. “I don't see how they ever dared run a railroad through here. It's a kind of defiance to nature. See that immense rock up there. Suppose it were to come crashing down.”

“What would become of us?” she managed to say.

“That would depend on the kind of lives we have been living,” returned the young man smilingly.

The girl answered his smile with another, not directly at him, but via the scenery as it were, which showed rows of even little teeth and two sudden charming dimples.

The young man led her into general conversation, from which he presently emerged to use a comment on the scenery as a basis for a transition to the personal.

“That must be the famous hanging bridge we are just coming to. I suppose it is supported from above by steel rods depending from the solid rock.” Then he pumped out his hesitating guess. “This is the first time you have been over this route, didn't you say? One fresh from the East nearly always finds the rugged Rockies interesting.”

“I am not from the East. I was born and brought up in Utah,” the girl volunteered after a pause.

“Oh, in Mormonland,” he laughed.

Her answering smile was a little hesitant. “Yes, if one likes to call it that.”

“I didn't mean it as a criticism. I have never been there, but, of course, one is aware that there are thousands of nice people among the Gentiles, and I am told that even among the Mormons there are many good folks. But you must know better than I. Occasionally you meet Mormons, I suppose.”

“Yes, occasionally.” There was a suggestion of a glow of amusement in her eyes. Presently she explained. “Mormonism is not generally considered contagious. Its followers mix with other people in business and sometimes in social relations.”

“But aren't they different from other people?”

“Not in the way you mean. Human nature is the same everywhere, isn't it? You can't tell a Methodist from a Baptist on the streets, can you; I mean if you don't know them?” There was in the manner of her speech a hesitation, almost a deference, that Burton was not used to find in the American girl he knew. He wondered what provincial environment was responsible for it.

“No—o,” he admitted, “but I have always had an idea that I could tell a Mormon.”

Her face was almost saucy now, the light of laughter in her eyes. “You will have ample chance to test your power of discrimination.”

“At Salt Lake? Yes, I suppose I shall.”

“Oh, before that, probably. I shouldn't wonder if there were Mormons even on this car.”

The young man looked around with a sudden interest, his eyes on a tour of inspection. “I don't see any that fit my conception, unless it is the stout gentleman who has just come out of the smoker.”

He thought her low silvery laugh the clearest ever coined. “He is a Unitarian minister, a Harvard man, I think.”

Burton threw up his hands and laughed with her. “I give up, then. Point out your Mormon.”

The girl's eyes, struggling with an undercurrent of mirth, slanted at him. He gained an impression of some joke in which he was not included. “I didn't say there was one. I said there might be,” she corrected.

“But,” he insisted, choosing his words, “how can they help being different from others, holding the beliefs they do?”

A shadow seemed to cross her mirth. “Which of their beliefs do you mean? Though I suppose it is not worth while asking that. There seems to be only one Mormon belief, so far as the East knows or cares.”

He was surprised at the candor with which the girl, whose face he could flood with blushes at a word, broached the subject. He had yet to learn that everybody in Utah, grown callous, handles it without gloves.

“Well, take that tenet. One would think that the people who believe in an anachronism like that must have a different mental outlook from other people. They must have some justification, good, at least, to themselves.”

“You are generous to them,” she cried with a touch of scorn he did not understand. “Many people deny them even that.”

“It would be interesting to catch their point of view,” he mused.

“They look at it as a divine command,” she explained. “Abraham was the father of the faithful, yet he had more wives than one. God approved him. Has God then changed? That is the Bible justification. Then there is the argument founded on reason.”

“On reason?”

“I used to—to know a girl about my age who was brought up in such a family. To her the home would have seemed lopsided with only one mother. The children were accustomed to sharing everything, even to their father. The family life was patriachal. The theory of such a plan of life is that it makes the women more unselfish and domestic, the father juster and more large-minded. It is a discipline laid on the people by command of God.”

“I don't think any man could be good enough for such a place. The burden on the women must be terrible, sometimes.”

“It is,” she said simply, and Burton saw in her eyes the shadowy sadness deepen.

He did not understand the reason for it, but his instinct led him to carry the conversation back to lighter topics.

“I've been wishing all day that heaven would drop some common acquaintance down between us just long enough to say, 'Miss Mauveline Hallett, may I present to you Mr. Gerald Burton?' and then whisk away instanter. But since heaven was not propitious I had to be my own ministering angel.”

She looked up surprised. “How do you know my name?”

“I heard the conductor read it from your ticket this morning.”

“Oh! I did not know.” A tide of beauty had flooded the girl's cheeks. “Perhaps I ought not to be talking with you, a stranger, without having been introduced. I am not used to traveling. I do not know the customs of meetings on a train. Perhaps I seem to you too free.”

Her lovely helplessness took Burton by the throat. “You innocent lamb! You sweet babe!” he thought. His grave answer reassured her. “You do not seem to me at all free. It is customary for people to talk together on a train without a formal introduction. It is usually understood that it is optional with the parties whether or not an acquaintance so formed shall be continued after the journey.”

“Oh, I didn't mean—I only meant—” she faltered.

“I understand what you meant,” he smiled down at her, and then, lest his presence embarass her, went back to his magazine. And she to her window, with its panorama of brown foothills ribbed with white where the snow filled the gulches, its jagged outline of blue; white mountains rising occasionally to lofty peaks made glorious in a bright silver as the sun caught their tips.

That she would be his guest in the diner that evening Gerald Burton had determined, and to make his position more defensible he had entered into alliance with a gentle-eyed old lady with a heart for mothering.

“She didn't have any lunch at all because she is too shy to go into the diner. You must induce her to join us this evening. I mean you both to be my guests, if you will. We can't let her starve, you know,” he urged.

And Mrs. Wheeler consenting, Burton introduced her to Miss Hallett. There was something very likable in the bright-eyed old lady, and she soon made friends with the girl. Then came the white-aproned waiter with his second call for supper, supper, and Gerald Burton in high good humor led his guests forward. The brilliantly lit dining car with its closely curtained windows, its shining silver and its white linen, its warm comfort compared with the bleak desert through which they rushed in the gathering night, combined with the easy manner and the gay rattle of whimsical talk of this broad-shouldered well-dressed youth, to lift Mauveline Hallett into an exhilaration foreign to her. Here, the girl from Salt Lake told herself, was a glimpse of that fascinating world which she had been taught to pray to be delivered from and which her secret heart had always longed to know, despite her pious petitions to be rid of carnal hopes.

After dinner Mrs. Wheeler seated herself beside the girl again and Burton kept subtly away. He had no desire to involve the old lady in any conversation interesting enough to retard her from retiring. So he devoted himself in his turn to the jagged line of peaks falling every instant into a deeper violet-blue, into a less sharply defined silhouette against the purple sky dashed with pink from the disappearing sun glow. When Mrs. Wheeler left for her own section Burton took the vacant seat beside Miss Hallett before she could show any indications of an intention to retire for the night.

He made her talk, carried her out of the rather sombre reserve into which she was apt to fall, and discovered in her an unconventional freshness of mind that delighted him. He found her alive to the mystery of common things, to the joy in life that is only for the eye that sees and the soul that interprets. For Mauveline Hallett was enjoying the keenest pleasure of a life singularily arid.

She had awakened as out of a Rip Van Winkle sleep to a sudden knowledge of a woman's heritage of life and power. The warm color fought in her cheeks, a soft glow lit her eyes. Her quickened blood was alertly conscious of the. presence of this young man so lean, debonair, and graceful, with the winning smile that openly courted her as his speech dared not. For her, life sang with what exulting heart beats! Nor could her inexperience know that this youth with eyes of fire, who spoke no word of love, was wooing her with his every gift of voice and manner, and that since she drank in all he said with parted lips and ear bent to miss no note, she was in woman's fashion telling him his suit was not indifferent to her. The winged hours flew like minutes, and it was midnight when she came to a sudden realization that all the berths had long since been made up and occupied except those of sections 7 and 8. She dismissed him hurriedly, a tide of color sweeping across her face and throat. But for one ponderable moment, as he said “Good-night,” her eyes were his before the lids dropped shyly down to hide what they might say.

 

Burton slept little. He knew that he had just met the woman that some day he would ask to be his wife. His mind was tossed in a whirling chaos. He wondered what environment had produced an individuality at once so shy and so frank, so untaught and so receptive. And through all the wild hope that was beating in him there ran a sense of futility, some premonition of a wall between them against which his love would beat in vain.

To his chagrin he found her next day more reserved. She had taken council in the night and found much to discourage her new born delight in the world outside her valley. Recognizing the environment which hemmed her in, she knew better than Burton the futility of trying to enlarge her interests. Such as it was her life was ordained for her. She tried to tell him something of this, but somehow the words would not come. Burton, seeking in vain to break down the barriers that had arisen between them in the night, was conscious of acute disappointment, and in this state he remained till he left her at the Salt Lake D. and R. G. depot with the grim-eyed, gray-whiskered old pirate who turned out to be her father.

Then a heavy hand clapped him on the shoulder, and he wheeled to greet his friend Clement Rogers who was down to meet him. Rogers lifted his hat to Miss Hallett and her father, and in the safety of the cab Burton presently demanded who she was.

“Miss Hallett—Miss Mauveline Hallett. I thought you knew her.”

“Oh, I don't want to know her name. I want to know about her,” said Burton impatiently.

“She is old Bishop Hallett's daughter, the prettiest Mormon girl in Utah, and as—”

“A Mormon!” echoed Burton amazed, the light breaking on him.

“Yes. Why not? Didn't she tell you?”

“But it's not possible! Are the Mormon girls like that?”

“One Mormon girl is,” returned Rogers dryly. Then he proceeded to prick more thoroughly any air bubbles that might exist. “It is a great pity she is going to marry old Prendergast.

Burton was conscious of a sudden sinking of the heart. “Prendergast! Who is he?”

“One of the old polygamous hierarchy that rules Utah. Mauveline Hallett will be his fourth wife.”

“I don't believe it; I don't believe the thing is possible. It isn't in the girl to do such a thing. My God! The thing is unthinkable.”

Rogers looked at him curiously. “Wouldn't she? Don't be too sure about that. You can never tell what a Mormon woman will do. You may depend on it that there will be a good deal of pressure brought to bear upon her. Old Hallett is a polygamist himself; one of the few stalwart bigots that are left of the old Brigham Young school. He is not very well fixed financially, and it would be a great match for one of his daughters to marry as rich and influential a Mormon as Prendergast. If the girl is a good Mormon they are likely to pull it through.”

“Force her to marry him?” demanded Burton, his eyes grown hard. “In the twentieth century; in the United States?”

“Utah isn't in the United States, and Mauveline Hallett isn't living in the twentieth century. Her father is a contemporary of the patriarchs, a sort of up-to-date Abraham. They won't compel her to marry Prendergast, but she will be made to understand that the church desires it, and the influence of the church is pretty strong, especially over the women.”

“But are you sure they want her to marry him?”

“It is a matter of common gossip. Young Chesley, also a Mormon, wanted to marry her, and he got to talking. For two days he told everybody that it was a shame and an outrage; then the church heard of it and put a padlock on his mouth.”

“But, Good God! Can't the thing be stopped?” burst out Burton.

“I wish you would tell me how.”

“Have you no law in this forsaken spot?”

“Plenty of it, my dear fellow; but those pertaining to this subject are suffering a little from innocuous desuetude. No legal proof. That's the trouble. Such things are known of common report, but that does not constitute proof. You can't get behind the curtains of the Church of Latter Day Saints. It is a wall you can't butt through. And if you could, to what end? The offender would be prosecuted by a Mormon lawyer, and tried before a Mormon judge by a Mormon jury. That is the beauty of a statehood, from the Mormon point of view. We're not in the days of the Edmunds-Tucker law, worse luck.”

“So you sit back and let an atrocious thing like this be done?”

“We do. We can't help it. There is just one person can hinder it, and I don't know whether she can. But it would be interesting to try. Go to Mauveline Hallett herself,' suggested Rogers, ironically.

“I will,” said Burton grimly.

Gerald Burton found Salt Lake a place much to his liking. The men he met at the University Club were vigorous clean-cut young Americans of that Western type which conceives and carries out big enterprises with unfettered imagination, at the same time keeping in touch with the East by periodic visits. But there grew in him a consuming restlessness to have speech with Mauveline Hallett. For, of one thing he was sure; that whatever he did should be done by storm while her impressions of him were still vivid and before she had fitted again into the groove of her old environment. He was nearly at the point of lying in wait for her outside her home when chance gave him his opportunity.

Walking down from the University club one afternoon he stopped an instant at the Brigham Young statue which stands at the head of Main street. On impulse he entered the enclosed square where are the temple and the tabernacle. At the office of the bureau of information he came face to face with Mauveline Hallett. She had been, since her return, selected as a guide to strangers desiring to visit the tabernacle, which selection was quite in accord with the church custom of putting its best foot forward.

Burton caught the glad shine in her eyes before she steadied them and came forward to shake hands with him. Every waking hour since she had arrived in Salt Lake she had been hoping for and fearing this meeting. That he would leave without seeing her again she had not for a moment believed, and she had prayed for composure to meet him unmoved. Divining at once that she was on guard to avoid any chance of subjecting herself to his influence, Burton sponged from his face all expression but surprised cordiality.

“I shall be fortunate in having an acquaintance as a guide, if you will be so good as to act in that capacity,” he said.

It had jumped to her mind to turn him over to the other guide, but now, since his manner offered no warning of danger, she would not show she feared him. She led him toward the tabernacle, telling in her clear, vibrant tones—the while he walked in Arden beside her lithe and lissom youth—the story of that wonderful achievement of her people which had eventuated in mastery over the barren desert. It was a thrilling story, well told, with effective touches of detail thrown in.

After they had gone through the usual formula of sitting in the gallery and listening to a pin drop 250 feet away to prove the acoustic qualities of the building, Burton opened the campaign by requesting Mauveline to tell him about the prophet Smith and the Book of Mormon. Her narrative of the pioneer life had been full of warmth and fervor, but now her limping tale was colorless. To herself it seemed more than usually unconvincing with this keen-eyed unbeliever flinging critical but not unfriendly criticisms at its vital weaknesses. He hailed it as a favorable omen that she never spoke of the belief of the church as her own personal faith.

“For how long have you been a doubter?” he asked, apparently quite as a matter of course.

She flung one startled glance at him. “Did I say I doubted?”

“You did not need to tell me in words. You are of a singularly honest and intelligent mind. You have been to school. You have mixed with Gentiles. I am sure that your instinct for what is true must for years have been at war with your loyalty to the church of your people. You are timid and you have mistrusted your reason, you have persuaded yourself that to question authority was a sin. But you have never ceased to be in revolt. The foundations of your faith are rocking. Am I not right?”

His divination seemed to the girl almost uncanny in its accuracy. “Are not many church creeds antiquated? May I not reject a part of our creed and retain that part of it which is founded on eternal truth?” she asked in a low voice.

His eyes met hers unflinchingly. “Not if the false doctrines in the creed are a part of the practice of the church. Not if you have been chosen as a sacrifice to exemplify those doctrines.”

The color wave swept her pale cheeks. “You have heard?”

“Yes, I have heard.”

“And you believe—?” She looked very lovely in her erect young pride, her questioning eyes daring him not to understand her.

“I believe,” he answered with repressed intensity, “that no power under heaven could drive you to it; but I know that there is no longer any room for you in the church where you were born. You will know no peace until you leave it.”

She smiled bitterly. “You talk as if that were an easy thing. You do not know how impossible—”

“Not impossible,” he corrected. “But difficult, I concede. I think I know some of the difficulties. Your father and your mother, your friends and all your relatives, the traditions of your life: you will have to break with them utterly. To your people you will be worse than dead, a renegade. They will hold you as one accursed. God knows I don't minimize the difficulties. You could not do it if you were not strong; but you can't live a lie.”

So, meeting her each day and walking home with her from her work, he hammered at her troubled heart and wavering impulses. He would give her no rest, though he saw her growing white and miserable under his assaults, for his instinct told him that his only chance was to drive her to immediate action. Since she could not remain in her church and marry an unbeliever he was resolved she should leave it. To her he seemed sure, confident, masterful, but as soon as he left her a sickening sense of failure always clutched at his heart.

On a day he spoke his love to her; not as other lovers tell the story, but simply as a fact, with a compelling insistence that would be content with no evasions. He forced her to admit her love for him.

“You will marry me at once?” he said, but his question was almost an assertion.

“I cannot.” Her voice was low and tortured.

“You shall,” he answered quietly.

“I can't—I can't,” she cried.

They were walking past the Beehive where Brigham Young had lived with his numerous families. He waved his hand toward it. “Do you think I will let you put that before your happiness—and mine?” he asked. Then the tenderness in him leaped to words for the first time. “Oh Mauveline, dear heart, I can't live without you; I can't go home and leave you here, darling. I must be cruel to be kind, and all the time my heart is bleeding for you. I seem to you hard, darling, but there is nothing in my mind but love always love.”

Her heart beat like a trip hammer. A delicious warmth suffused her.

“If I could—if I only could!” was her soul cry.

“You will find it easier to break away than you think when you make up your mind to it,” he insisted always.

Before he left he told her that he was going up to Idaho on mining business for a week. When he came back she must be ready to marry him. But she would give no promise.

That night the dictator in Bishop Hallett woke up. He had heard rumors in the city of his daughter and the young Gentile Burton that disquieted him. Bluntly he demanded of her the truth. When she told him he bade her prepare for a journey. That night he took her to Brigham city, on a visit to one of Apostle Prendergast's plural wives who lived on a farm near that place. That Mauveline should be brought into direct touch with her future environment appeared to her father and to the apostle a desirable condition. It was unfortunate for their plans that Clement Rogers was on board the same train in the seat behind them. He could hardly help discovering their destination.

It was ten days since Mauveline Hallett had left Salt Lake, and every day had been a long torture to her. For a week Prendergast had been down to the farm, and had shown himself the pink of courtesy to Mrs. Prendergast the third, perhaps to impress their guest with the desirability of obtaining him for a husband. There had been long drives, usually with, but once or twice without, Mrs. Prendergast, and the apostle's ponderous wooing had proceeded apace. To Miss Hallett the situation was odious and hateful, but the callous of long custom and her habit of not letting herself sit in judgment on her parents and those in authority, whom she knew to be good and honest people, kept it at least from being shameful. Indeed, at times the tenor of her life teaching had its way, and she wondered if after all she were not a stiff-necked and rebellious daughter of Zion.

Today she walked listlessly along the white highway of the valley which ran between the red-brown sides of the flat-topped hills. She craved rest with all her heart, for both physically and mentally she was weary to exhaustion with the turmoil. The sound of rapid wheels came to her, and without looking up she stepped to the side of the road. The carriage stopped abruptly, and somebody leaped to the ground. A pair of strong arms went round her, and she turned her face to meet her Gentile lover's kisses. She gave herself to his embrace without resistance. Her tired head found the rest it longed for against his broad shoulder. A sweet peace stole over her heart and wrapped her in.

“Come, love!” said Gerald Burton, and she had no thought of denial.

He lifted her into the trap and drove rapidly to the railway station. They took the first train for Salt Lake. She asked no questions. The responsibility of her future had been lifted to broader shoulders and she was content that it should be so. At Salt Lake they drove in a hack to the house of a minister whom Burton had met at the club. From there he telephoned to Rogers to bring his wife that they might serve as witnesses. The license he had already procured. He and Mauveline were made man and wife within the hour.

She flung herself into his arms in a tempest of tears as soon as they were alone.

“Oh, Gerald, be good to me, be good to me,” she sobbed. “I have no father and no mother, now. I am an outcast from my people and my church. I have nobody in all the world but you.”

Her face was buried in his coat, but he soothed her as a lover may, kissing the wavy brown hair and the tiny ear tips that were visible.

“So help me God, I will,” said the young man reverently.