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 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?”