THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT
CARTER WATSON, a current magazine under his arm, strolled
slowly along, gazing about him curiously. Twenty years had
elapsed since he had been on this particular street, and the
changes were great and stupefying. This Western city of three
hundred thousand souls had contained but thirty thousand, when,
as a boy, he had been wont to ramble along its streets. In
those days the street he was now on had been a quiet residence
street in the respectable workingclass quarter. On this late
afternoon he found that it had been submerged by a vast and
vicious tenderloin. Chinese and Japanese shops and dens
abounded, all confusedly intermingled with low white resorts
and boozing dens. This quiet street of his youth had become the
toughest quarter of the city.
He looked at his watch. It was half-past five. It was the slack
time of the day in such a region, as he well knew, yet he was
curious to see. In all his score of years of wandering and
studying social conditions over the world, he had carried with
him the memory of his old town as a sweet and wholesome place.
The metamorphosis he now beheld was startling. He certainly
must continue his stroll and glimpse the infamy to which his
town had descended.
Another thing: Carter Watson had a keen social and civic
consciousness. Independently wealthy, he had been loath to
dissipate his energies in the pink teas and freak dinners of
society, while actresses, race-horses, and kindred diversions
had left him cold. He had the ethical bee in his bonnet and was
a reformer of no mean pretension, though his work had been
mainly in the line of contributions to the heavier reviews and
quarterlies and to the publication over his name of brightly,
cleverly written books on the working classes and the
slum-dwellers. Among the twenty-seven to his credit occurred
titles such as, "If Christ Came to New Orleans," " The
Worked-out Worker," "Tenement Reform in Berlin," "The Rural
Slums of England," "The people of the East Side," "Reform
Versus Revolution," "The University Settlement as a Hot Bed of
Radicalism' and "The Cave Man of Civilization."
But Carter Watson was neither morbid nor fanatic. He did not
lose his head over the horrors he encountered, studied, and
exposed. No hair brained enthusiasm branded him. His humor
saved him, as did his wide experience and his con. conservative
philosophic temperament. Nor did he have any patience with
lightning change reform theories. As he saw it, society would
grow better only through the painfully slow and arduously
painful processes of evolution. There were no short cuts, no
sudden regenerations. The betterment of mankind must be worked
out in agony and misery just as all past social betterments had
been worked out.
But on this late summer afternoon, Carter Watson was curious.
As he moved along he paused before a gaudy drinking place. The
sign above read, "The Vendome." There were two entrances. One
evidently led to the bar. This he did not explore. The other
was a narrow hallway. Passing through this he found himself in
a huge room, filled with chair-encircled tables and quite
deserted. In the dim light he made out a piano in the distance.
Making a mental note that he would come back some time and
study the class of persons that must sit and drink at those
multitudinous tables, he proceeded to circumnavigate the room.
Now, at the rear, a short hallway led off to a small kitchen,
and here, at a table, alone, sat Patsy Horan, proprietor of the
Vendome, consuming a hasty supper ere the evening rush of
business. Also, Patsy Horan was angry with the world. He had
got out of the wrong side of bed that morning, and nothing had
gone right all day. Had his barkeepers been asked, they would
have described his mental condition as a grouch. But Carter
Watson did not know this. As he passed the little hallway,
Patsy Horan's sullen eyes lighted on the magazine he carried
under his arm. Patsy did not know Carter Watson, nor did he
know that what he carried under his arm was a magazine. Patsy,
out of the depths of his grouch, decided that this stranger was
one of those pests who marred and scarred the walls of his back
rooms by tacking up or pasting up advertisements. The color on
the front cover of the magazine convinced him that it was such
an advertisement. Thus the trouble began. Knife and fork in
hand, Patsy leaped for Carter Watson.
"Out wid yeh!" Patsy bellowed. "I know yer game!"
Carter Watson was startled. The man had come upon him like the
eruption of a jack-in-the-box.
"A defacin' me walls," cried Patsy, at the same time emitting a
string of vivid and vile, rather than virile, epithets of
opprobrium.
"If I have given any offense I did not mean to--"
But that was as far as the visitor got. Patsy interrupted.
"Get out wid yeh; yeh talk too much wid yer mouth," quoted
Patsy, emphasizing his remarks with flourishes of the knife and
fork.
Carter Watson caught a quick vision of that eating-fork
inserted uncomfortably between his ribs, knew that it would be
rash to talk further with his mouth, and promptly turned to go.
The sight of his meekly retreating back must have further
enraged Patsy Horan, for that worthy, dropping the table
implements, sprang upon him.
Patsy weighed one hundred and eighty pounds. So did Watson. In
this they were equal. But Patsy was a rushing, rough-and-tumble
saloon-fighter, while Watson was a boxer. In this the latter
had the advantage, for Patsy came in wide open, swinging his
right in a perilous sweep. All Watson had to do was to
straight-left him and escape. But Watson had another advantage.
His boxing, and his experience in the slums and ghettos of the
world, had taught him restraint.
He pivoted on his feet, and, instead of striking, ducked the
other's swinging blow and went into a clinch. But Patsy,
charging like a bull, had the momentum of his rush, while
Watson, whirling to meet him, had no momentum. As a result, the
pair of them went down, with all their three hundred and sixty
pounds of weight, in a long crashing fall, Watson underneath.
He lay with his head touching the rear wall of the large room.
The street was a hundred and fifty feet away, and he did some
quick thinking. His first thought was to avoid trouble. He had
no wish to get into the papers of this, his childhood town,
where many of his relatives and family friends still lived.
So it was that he locked his arms around the man on top of him,
held him close, and waited for the help to come that must come
in response to the crash of the fall. The help came--that is,
six men ran in from the bar and formed about in a semi-circle.
'Take him off, fellows," Watson said. "I haven't struck him,
and I don't want any fight."
But the semi-circle remained silent. Watson held on and waited.
Patsy, after various vain efforts to inflict damage, made an
overture.
"Leggo o' me an' I'll get off o' yeh," said he.
Watson let go, but when Patsy scrambled to his feet he stood
over his recumbent foe, ready to strike.
"Get up," Patsy commanded.
His voice was stern and implacable, like the voice of God
calling to judgment, and Watson knew there was no mercy there.
"Stand back and I'll get up," he countered.
"If yer a gentleman, get up," quoth Patsy, his pale blue eyes
aflame with wrath, his fist ready for a crushing blow.
At the same moment he drew his foot back to kick the other in
the face. Watson blocked the kick with his crossed arms and
sprang to his feet so quickly that he was in a clinch with his
antagonist before the latter could strike. Holding him, Watson
spoke to the onlookers:
"Take him away from me, fellows. You see I am not striking him.
I don't want to fight. I want to get out of here."
The circle did not move nor speak. Its silence was ominous and
sent a chill to Watson's heart.
Patsy made an effort to throw him, which culminated in his
putting Patsy on his back. Tearing loose from him, Watson
sprang to his feet and made for the door. But the circle of men
was interposed a wall. He noticed the white, pasty faces, the
kind that never see the sun, and knew that the men who barred
his way were the nightprowlers and preying beasts of the city
jungle. By them he was thrust back upon the pursuing,
bull-rushing Patsy.
Again it was a clinch, in which, in momentary safety, Watson
appealed to the gang. And again his words fell on deaf ears.
Then it was that he knew of many similar knew fear. For he had
known of many similar situations, in low dens like this, when
solitary men were man-handled, their ribs and features caved
in, themselves beaten and kicked to death. And he knew,
further, that if he were to escape he must neither strike his
assailant nor any of the men who opposed him.
Yet in him was righteous indignation. Under no circumstances
could seven to one be fair. Also, he was angry, and there
stirred in him the fighting beast that is in all men. But he
remembered his wife and children, his unfinished book, the ten
thousand rolling acres of the up-country ranch he loved so
well. He even saw in flashing visions the blue of the sky, the
golden sun pouring down on his flower-spangled meadows, the
lazy cattle knee-deep in the brooks, and the flash of trout in
the riffles. Life was good-too good for him to risk it for a
moment's sway of the beast. In short, Carter Watson was cool
and scared.
His opponent, locked by his masterly clinch, was striving to
throw him. Again Watson put him on the floor, broke away, and
was thrust back by the pasty-faced circle to duck Patsy's
swinging right and effect another clinch. This happened many
times. And Watson grew even cooler, while the baffled Patsy,
unable to inflict punishment, raged wildly and more wildly. He
took to batting with his head in the clinches. The first time,
he landed his forehead flush on Watson's nose. After that, the
latter, in the clinches, buried his face in Patsy's breast. But
the enraged Patsy batted on, striking his own eye and nose and
cheek on the top of the other's head. The more he was thus
injured, the more and the harder did Patsy bat.
This one-sided contest continued for twelve or fifteen minutes.
Watson never struck a blow, and strove only to escape.
Sometimes, in the free moments, circling about among the tables
as he tried to win the door, the pasty-faced men gripped his
coat-tails and flung him back at the swinging right of the
on-rushing Patsy. Time upon time, and times without end, he
clinched and put Patsy on his back, each time first whirling
him around and putting him down in the direction of the door
and gaining toward that goal by the length of the fall.
In the end, hatless, disheveled, with streaming nose and one
eye closed, Watson won to the sidewalk and into the arms of a
policeman.
"Arrest that man," Watson panted.
"Hello, Patsy," said the policeman. "What's the mix-up?"
"Hello, Charley," was the answer. "This guy comes in--"
"Arrest that man, officer," Watson repeated.
"G'wan! Beat it!" said Patsy.
"Beat it!" added the policeman. "If you don't, I'll pull you
in."
"Not unless you arrest that man. He has committed a violent and
unprovoked assault on me."
"Is it so, Patsy?" was the officer's query.
"Nah. Lemme tell you, Charley, an' I got the witnesses to prove
it, so help me God. I was settin' in me kitchen eatin' a bowl
of soup, when this guy comes in an' gets gay wid me. I never
seen him in me born days before. He was drunk--"
"Look at me, officer," protested the indignant sociologist. "Am
I drunk?"
The officer looked at him with sullen, menacing eyes and nodded
to Patsy to continue.
"This guy gets gay wid me. 'I'm Tim McGrath,' says he, 'an' I
can do the like to you,' says he. 'Put up yer hands.' I smiles,
an' wid that, biff biff, he lands me twice an' spills me soup.
Look at me eye. I'm fair murdered."
"What are you going to do, officer?" Watson demanded.
"Go on, beat it," was the answer, "or I'll pull you sure."
The civic righteousness of Carter Watson flamed up.
"Mr. Officer, I protest--"
But at that moment the policeman grabbed his arm with a savage
jerk that nearly overthrew him.
"Come on, you're pulled."
"Arrest him, too," Watson demanded.
"Nix on that play," was the reply.
"What did you assault him for, him a peacefully eatin' his
soup?"
