All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren [115]
“Let me see,” the Frenchman said, and moved toward the door with, apparently, the “insolent expectation” that the group there would dissolve before him. He went out into the hal, Mr. Simms following. While Mr. Simms locked the door, Cass said to him, “I wish to speak to you, if you are Mr. Simms.”
“Huh? Mr. Simms said (“grunted” according to the journal), but looking at Cass became suddenly civil for he could know from dress and bearing that Cass was not one of the casual hangers-on. So Mr. Simms admitted the Frenchman to the next room to inspect its occupant, and returned to Cass. Cass remarked in the journal that trouble might have been avoided if he had been more careful to speak inn private, but he wrote that at the time the matter was so much upon his mind that the men who stood about were as shadows to him.
He explained his wish to Mr. Simms, described Phebe as well as possible, gave the name of the trader in Paducah, and offered a liberal commission. Mr. Simms seemed dubious, promised to do what he could, and then said, “But nine outa ten you won’t git her, Mister. And we got sumthen here better. You done seen Delphy, and she’s nigh white as airy woman, and a sight more juicy, and that gal you talk about is nuthen but yaller. Now Delphy–”
“But the young gemmun got a hanheren fer yaller,” one of the hangers-on said, and laughed, and the others laughed too.
Cass struck him across the mouth. “I struck him with the side of my fist,” Cass wrote, “to bring blood. I struck him without thought, and I recollect the surprise which visited me when I saw the blood on his chin and saw him draw a bowie from his shirt front. I attempted to avoid his first blow, but received it upon my left shoulder. Before he could withdraw, I had grasped his wrist in my right hand, forced it down so that I could also use my left hand, which still had some strength left at that moment, and with a turning motion of my body I broke his arm across my right hip, and then knocked him to the floor. I recovered the bowie from the floor, and with it faced the man who seemed to be the friend of the man who was now prostrate. He had a knife in his hand, but he seemed disinclined to pursue the discussion.”
Cass declined the assistance of Mr. Simms, pressed a handkerchief over his wound, walked out of the building and toward his lodgings, and collapsed on West Short Street. He was carried home. The next day he was better. He learned that Mrs. Trice had left the city, presumably for Washington. A couple of days later his wound infected, and for some time he lay in delirium between life and death. His recovery was slow, presumably retarded by what he termed in the journal his “will toward darkness.” But his constitution was stronger than his will, and he recovered, to know himself as the “chief of sinners and a plague spot on the body of the human world.” He would have committed suicide except for the fear of damnation for that act, for though “hopeless of Grace I yet clung to the hope of Grace.” But sometimes the very fact of damnation because of suicide seemed to be the very reason for suicide: he had brought his friend to suicide and the friend, by that act, was eternally damned; therefore he, Cass Mastern, should, in justice, insure his own damnation by the same act. “But the Lord preserved me from self-slaughter for ends which are His and beyond my knowledge.”
Mrs. Trice did not come back to Lexington.
He returned to Mississippi. For two years he operated his plantation, read the Bible, prayed, and, strangely enough, prospered greatly, almost as though against his will. In the end he repaid Gilbert his debt, and set free his slaves. He had some notion of operating the plantation with the same force on a wage basis. “You fool,” Gilbert said to him, “be a private fool if you must, but in God’s name don’t be a public one. Do you think you can work them and them free? One day work, one day loaf. Do you think you can have a passel of free niggers next door to a plantation with slaves? If you did have to set them free, you don’t have to