I am still a coward though I have my own roar inside

On the way back home today, I witnessed a not so pleasant scene on the bus. I saw a middle-aged man and woman (they were couple, it seemed) got on the bus when I was sitting on a seat in the back row. They came towards me and chose the row that has 4 face-to-face seats and that was just one row in front of me. The woman came first and chose the forward-facing seat to sit on. The man came just little later and insisted her on changing to the opposite seat. In fact, she was forced to move by his hand pushing on the shoulder. The man quickly sat on the seat right after the woman stood up and made a turn. She was surprised and speechless in a brief moment.

In the blink of an eye, they started to fight when they were sitting down. In a language that was neither French nor English, they yelled at each other, loudly enough to be noticed by everyone sitting around 1 or 2 rows away. After half a minute or so, again the man forced the woman to get up and go with him to the back door. He wanted to get off the bus at the next stop. Before leaving the bus, he didn’t stop mumbling and pointing his finger at the woman’s face. Here is such another jerk he is, at the next bus stop. They had a huge fight when they just got off. The man violently pushed the woman’s hands down everytime she tried to talk back with her forearms raised up as a demand for an explanation. The bus stayed awhile and then finally went on. Everyone on the bus did see everything from the beginning. Some discretly showed their disagreement, some were silent. I stayed silent.

I should have done something, instead of letting it pass, writing here the story and bothering you, my readers, with great regret. I was about to speak up in the last moment when there was the huge fight, actually. “Stop being a jerk, man!”, “Heyy, don’t you harass her like that!”, “Stop touching her like that!”, even in my weak foreign-accent French if somehow they could understand “Arrêtez monsieur. C’est pas gentil avec elle!”. But yeah, eventually I did nothing about it. I could have saved her from more and more aggressive behavior from the man or something else even worse if I had spoken up. Next time maybe, I will have to let my inner voice out. We should not be really afraid of bad people, but the silence of good ones.

The act of an ‘old’ friend of mine keeps flashing in my head at this moment of writing. “R-E-S-P-E-C-T-E-Z LE F-E-U!” when he saw a cyclist passing a red light.

PS: Knowing that I don't really know the root cause for his behavior, and that I don't really know the story, but violence, no matter how small it is, is not acceptable as the first solution.