It was a piece of workmanship which would have been creditable to any New York firm,—apparently a richly carved circle, twined with gilt vines, leaves, and tendrils, blossoming all over with flaming wax-lights, and suspended by a massive chain of golden lustre. So I replied that he probably paid a thousand dollars for it in New York.
"Capital!" exclaimed Brigham. "I made it myself! That circle is a cartwheel which I washed and gilded; it hangs by a pair of gilt ox-chains; and the ornaments of the candlesticks were all cut after my patterns out of sheet-tin!"
I talked with the President till a party of young girls, who seemed to regard him with idolatry, and whom, in return, he treated with a sage mixture of gallantry and fatherliness, came to him with an invitation to join in some old-fashioned contra-dance long forgotten at the East. I was curious to see how he would acquit himself in this supreme ordeal of dignity; so I descended to the parquet, and was much impressed by the aristocratic grace with which he went through his figures.
After that I excused myself from numerous kind invitations by the ball-committee to be introduced to a partner and join in the dances. The fact was that I greatly wished to make a thorough physiognomical study of the ball-room, and I know that my readers will applaud my self-denial in not dancing, since it enables me to tell them how Utah good society looks.
After spending an hour in a circuit and survey of the room as minute as was compatible with decency, I arrived at the following results.
There was very little ostentation in dress at the ball, but there was also very little taste in dressing. Patrician broadcloth and silk were the rare exceptions, generally ill-made and ill-worn, but they cordially associated with the great mass of plebeian tweed and calico. Few ladies wore jewelry or feathers. There were some pretty girls swimming about in tasteful whip-syllabub of puffed tarlatan. Where saintly gentlemen came with several wives, the oldest generally seemed the most elaborately dressed, and acted much like an Eastern chaperon toward her younger sisters. (Wives of the same man habitually besister each other in Utah. Another triumph of grace!) Among the men I saw some very strong and capable faces; but the majority had not much character in their looks,—indeed, differed little in that regard from any average crowd of men anywhere. Among the women, to my surprise, I found no really degraded faces, though many stolid ones,—only one deeply dejected, (this belonged to the wife of a hitherto monogamic husband, who had left her alone in the dress-circle, while he was dancing with a chubby young Mormoness, likely to be added to the family in a month or two,) but many impassive ones; and though I saw multitudes of kindly, good-tempered countenances, and a score which would have been called pretty anywhere, I was obliged to confess, after a most impartial and anxious search, that I had not met a single woman who looked high-toned, first-class, capable of poetic enthusiasm or heroic self-devotion,—not a single woman whom an artist would dream of and ask to sit for a study,—not one to whom a finely constituted intellectual man could come for companionship in his pursuits or sympathy in his yearnings. Because I knew that this verdict would be received at the East with a "Just as you might have expected!" I cast aside everything like prejudice, and forgot that I was in Utah, as I threaded the great throng.
I must condense greatly what I have to say about two other typical men besides Brigham Young, or I shall have no room to speak of the Lake and the Desert. Heber Kimball, second President, (proximus longo intervallo!) Brigham's most devoted worshipper, and in all respects the next most important man, although utterly incapable of keeping coherent the vast tissue of discordant Mormon elements, in case he should survive Brigham, is the latter's equal in years, but in all things else his antipodes. His height is over six feet, his form of aldermanic rotundity, his face large, plethoric, and lustrous with the stable red of stewed cranberries, while his small, twinkling black beads of eyes and a Satyric sensualism about the mouth would indicate a temperament fatally in the way of any apostleship save that of polygamy, even without the aid of an induction from his favorite topics of discourse and his patriarchally unvarnished style of handling them. Men, everywhere, unfortunately, tend little toward the error of bashfulness in their chat among each other, but most of us at the East would feel that we were insulting the lowest member of the demi-monde, if we uttered before her a single sentence of the talk which forms the habitual staple of all Heber Kimball's public sermons to the wives and daughters who throng the Sunday Tabernacle.
Heber took a vivid interest in Bierstadt's and my own eternal welfare. He quite laid himself out for our conversion, coming to sit with us at breakfast in our Mormon hotel, dressed in a black swallow-tail, buff vest, and a stupendous truncate cone of Leghorn, which made him look like an Italian mountebank-physician of the seventeenth century. I have heard men who could misquote Scripture for their own ends, and talk a long while without saying anything; but he so far surpassed in these particulars the loftiest efforts within my former experience, that I could think of no comparison for him but Jack Bunsby taken to exhorting. Witness a sample:—
"Seven women shall take a hold o' one man! There!" (with a slap on the back of the nearest subject for conversion). "What d' ye think o' that? Shall! Shall take a hold on him! That don't mean they sha'n't, does it? No! God's word means what it says. And therefore means no otherwise,—not in no way, shape, nor manner. Not in no way, for He saith, 'I am the way—and the truth and the life.' Not in no shape, for a man beholdeth his nat'ral shape in a glass; nor in no manner, for he straightway forgetteth what manner o' man he was. Seven women shall catch a hold on him. And ef they shall, then they will! For everything shall come to pass, and not one good word shall fall to the ground. You who try to explain away the Scriptur' would make it fig'rative. But don't come to ME with none o' your spiritooalizers! Not one good word shall fall. Therefore seven shall not fall. And ef seven shall catch a hold on him,—and, as I jist proved, seven will catch a hold on him,—then seven ought,—and in the Latter-Day Glory, seven, yea, as our Lord said un-tew Peter, 'Verily I say un-tew you, not seven, but seventy times seven,' these seventy times seven shall catch a hold and cleave. Blessed day! For the end shall be even as the beginnin', and seventy-fold more abundantly. Come over into my garden."
This invitation would wind up the homily. We gladly accepted it, and I must confess, that, if there ever could be any hope of our conversion, it was just about the time we stood in Brother Heber's fine orchard, eating apples and apricots between exhortations, and having sound doctrine poked down our throats with gooseberries as big as plums, to take the taste out of our mouths, like jam after castor-oil.