So thoroughly was Bill Totts himself, so thoroughly a workman, a genuine
denizen of South of the Slot, that he was as class-conscious as the
average of his kind, and his hatred for a scab even exceeded that of the
average loyal union man. During the Water Front Strike, Freddie Drummond
was somehow able to stand apart from the unique combination, and, coldly
critical, watch Bill Totts hilariously slug scab longshoremen. For Bill
Totts was a dues-paying member of the Longshoremen Union and had a right
to be indignant with the usurpers of his job. “Big” Bill Totts was so
very big, and so very able, that it was “Big” Bill to the front when
trouble was brewing. From acting outraged feelings, Freddie Drummond, in
the rôle of his other self, came to experience genuine outrage, and it
was only when he returned to the classic atmosphere of the university
that he was able, sanely and conservatively, to generalize upon his
underworld experiences and put them down on paper as a trained
sociologist should. That Bill Totts lacked the perspective to raise him
above class-consciousness Freddie Drummond clearly saw. But Bill Totts
could not see it. When he saw a scab taking his job away, he saw red at
the same time, and little else did he see. It was Freddie Drummond,
irreproachably clothed and comported, seated at his study desk or facing
his class in _Sociology_ 17, who saw Bill Totts, and all around Bill
Totts, and all around the whole scab and union-labour problem and its
relation to the economic welfare of the United States in the struggle for
the world market. Bill Totts really wasn’t able to see beyond the next
meal and the prize-fight the following night at the Gaiety Athletic Club.
It was while gathering material for _Women and Work_ that Freddie
received his first warning of the danger he was in. He was too
successful at living in both worlds. This strange dualism he had
developed was after all very unstable, and, as he sat in his study and
meditated, he saw that it could not endure. It was really a transition
stage, and if he persisted he saw that he would inevitably have to drop
one world or the other. He could not continue in both. And as he looked
at the row of volumes that graced the upper shelf of his revolving
book-case, his volumes, beginning with his Thesis and ending with _Women
and Work_, he decided that that was the world he would hold to and stick
by. Bill Totts had served his purpose, but he had become a too dangerous
accomplice. Bill Totts would have to cease.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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