W. Somerset Maugham: Collected Short Stories Volume 4 (II)

 'The Book Bag' & 'The Back of Beyond'

First story in the collection, ‘The Book-Bag’, is being narrated by the writer. Its beginning is exceptionally fascinating. Maugham starts with some off-the-cuff remarks about his reading habits. ‘Some people read for instruction, which is praiseworthy, and some for pleasure, which is innocent, but not a few read from habit, and I suppose that this is neither innocent nor praiseworthy. Of that lamentable company am I’. He goes onto explain what a book-bag is. Once incarcerated in Java for three months because of an illness, he exhausted all the books he had with him. He was then ‘obliged to buy the schoolbooks from which intelligent Javanese…acquired knowledge of French and German’. Since then, he ‘made a point of travelling with the largest sack made for carrying soiled linen and filling it to the brim with books.’ Except for this bag, he informs us, ‘he should perhaps never have heard the singular history of Olive Hardy’.

Maugham had been ‘wandering about Malaya, staying here and there, a week or two if there was a rest-house or a hotel’ or in the house of a planter or a District Officer. He was in Panang for a few days and was asked by the acting Resident, Mark Featherstone, whom he knew only by name, to spend a few days with him at Tenggarah, where the Resident was then posted. Featherstone stayed alone in a large house on a wooded hill. In the evening he took the narrator to the club. They drank whiskies and gin pahits and played bridge. Two local men gave them company in the game. Maugham didn’t notice his companions, only the fact that one of them played very well.

Back at his residence, after dinner, Featherstone asked Maugham for a book to read in the night. Maugham emptied the book-bag, seizing its bottom and dragging it away on the floor as the ‘rivers of books poured on to the floor’. Featherstone was astonished by the sight. He picked out a life of Byron. When Maugham queried him about the man who played well at the club, Featherstone said he was Tim Hardy, who owned a rubber plantation a little distance off. When asked if Hardy was married, Featherstone seemed to stutter before answering that he lived alone on the estate, his wife lived in England – ‘There was something in the way Featherstone spoke that’ stuck Maugham a little strange.

The next day, Featherstone asked Maugham if he had liked Byron’s life, which Featherstone had borrowed the previous night. He was intrigued by the story in it about Byron and his sister. ‘Do you think they were really in love with one another?’, he asked. In the matter of conversation, he brought up Tim Hardy. ‘What did you think of Hardy?’, he asked Maugham. He then, unprompted, went on to narrate Tim Hardy’s story.

Tim and his sister Olive, lived on a rubber estate alone. Their parents didn’t get along with each other. Caught in their parents' fights, children had been thrown quite on their own resources. They were immensely fond of each other. Their parents separated when they were kids. Tim went to live with his father in their ancestral house in Dorsetshire while Olive went with her mother to Italy. They used to meet on vacations. Their mother died when Olive was eighteen and Tim a year younger. Olive came to live with Tim and their father. A few years later their father, an alcoholic, died too. They had no other relatives. They had a little private income from their inheritance. They bought a rubber estate in FMS. 

It was here, in Sibuku, Featherstone befriended them. He used to visit them often on their estate. He hugely enjoyed the company of this reserved but happy duo. The strangest thing about them was that they appeared so immensely occupied in each other’s company. Olive ‘had a way of looking at Tim, with a slow, sidelong glance from under her long eyelashes, that was rather engaging’. One couldn’t help noticing that they were completely happy in their own world. They did not abjure people’s company, were polite to all in the colony, organised dinners for them regularly and attended the club. But they did not need any of it.

Featherstone fell in love with Olive and wanted to marry her. But she wouldn’t hear any of it. When Featherstone asked ‘why not?’, she replied, ‘I could never leave Tom’.

Tim once went alone to England on an errand. Olive remained behind. Featherstone visited her regularly. He had accepted that she would never accept his proposal. On one such occasion, a few weeks before Tim’s expected arrival, Featherstone found Olive distraught. ‘I’ve just had a cable from Tim to say he’s postponed his sailing.’ She’d been crying. ‘I’ve been counting the days. I want him back so badly.’

On the day when the mail was due in Sibuku, Olive’s amah sent a message to Featherstone to go to her mistress. When he entered Olive’s room, Featherstone ‘heard a sound that froze’ his heart. Olive was lying on her face, and ‘her sobs shook her from head to foot’. ‘‘’ Tim’s married’ she howled. ‘How could he? … He says it won’t make any difference. He’s insane. How can I stay here?”’

As Tim drove into his estate, with his bride, a few days later, he sounded the horn of his car. There was a shot from Olive’s room. They ran to it. Olive lay in a pool of blood. She had shot herself.

The same night Tim’s bride came to Featherstone’s house. She wanted him to put her on the train that was leaving the village in a few hours. She wouldn’t listen to Featherstone’s entreaties to think calmly how her abandoning Tim will affect him. ‘He had no right to marry me. It was monstrous’, was all she would tell Featherstone. And he put her on the train after a few hours.

Maugham doesn’t mention the word incest once in the story. He never writes directly about the relation that Tim and Olive shared. Only through indirect, cryptic, and suggestive hints Maugham unravels the uniqueness of Tim and Olive’s life. But the reader is never in doubt about it. Maugham is not judgemental about this strange relation. He is just relating some extraordinary events in life of ordinary people.  

In preface to one of his story collections Maugham said that ‘The Book Bag’ was told to him, as it was, and he ‘had nothing to do but make (it) probable, coherent and dramatic’.

None wrote stories in first person more expertly than Maugham.

The technique enhances story’s probability in reader’s mind. Reader feels he is privy to a personal experience of the writer – ‘It tends also to put the reader on intimate terms with the author’. But a danger lurks around the corner: Writer may put too much of himself ‘and thus be as boring as a talker who insists on monopolizing the conversation’. Maugham has skilfully avoided this pitfall in his fiction. Writer is always there, like an apparition, but never dominates a scene or a dialogue.

…

‘The Back of Beyond’, is the story of rubber-planters in Timbang Belud. George Moon, the punctilious, aloof Resident, is retiring in a few days. He is loved by the coolies and the workers at the plantation, and hated by the planters, because he would not let later ride roughshod over their workers. He is dispassionate and officious, ‘there was nothing come-hither’ in him. Though he considered his service as an official success, he knew that ‘he had been feared and not loved. … no one would regret him. In a few months he would be forgotten’. He is aware that the best part of his life is over. He was in mid-fifties, wiry, and vigorous. But, ‘his future was blank. … All that remained to him was to settle down in a country town in England or in a cheap part of Riviera and play bridge with elderly ladies and golf with retired colonels’.

Maugham has given Moon many of his own traits. It is easy for one who has read Maugham extensively to believe that Maugham was a dispassionate, dry-as-a-bone old cynic, who accepted neither virtue nor sin on its face value. The I is the most interesting character in his numerous stories – though it is mostly in the background. He leads you by arm through the scenes and dialogues till the story is laid bare before you, clear as the sunlight.  Narrator is a well-to-do, worldly-wise, sagacious, imperturbable, cigar-smoking gentleman who has endless time on his hands as he sails from one South Sea island to the other gathering strange stories of the people leading a drab and a monotonous life. I, alike Maugham, is not interested in the vicissitudes of the characters he meets, only in the strangeness of their stories. ‘My sympathies were not deeply engaged in the matter,’ was Maugham’s usual quip. To VS Pritchett, an English story writer, and a literary critic, Maugham’s narrator was ‘the Great Dry Martini (a drink Maugham liked immensely)’. Cyril Connoly said, ‘everything there is to say about Maugham has (so it seems) already been said by Maugham himself’.

Moon, thus, waiting for the last day of his service to end, was surprised when Tom Saffary was ushered into his office. Saffary was a ‘big, burly, stout fellow, with a red face and a double chin. … (who) drank a good deal and ate too heartily’. He had a large rubber plantation that he managed efficiently. On a previous occasion, Moon had been severe with him when he discovered that Saffary had assaulted one of his workers. He fined him for his misdemeanour. Saffary took it as a slight to his honour in front of his workers and was not on speaking terms with Moon since. It tickled Moon’s acerbic sense of humour to know that Saffary has now been nominated as the chief organiser for Moon’s farewell that is being hosted by the planters. He was amused to speculate that tonight Saffary would be constrained to speak only of Moon’s good work in his send-off speech.

Saffary told Moon that he would not be able to attend the function in the night. He didn’t want Moon to misconstrue his absence as a consequence of the unpleasantness they have had in the past. He and his wife could not attend the party because of the death of Knobby Clarke a few days ago. Knobby, a planter, was on a ship, going to England on vacation. His death was announced in the Singapore paper.

Knobby was a close friend of Saffary. ‘Tears shone in Tom Saffary’s eyes’ as he was talking to Moon. Moon discerned a little hesitation in Saffary’s voice. He noticed that Saffary was reluctant to leave even after this conversation. Saffary said, diffidently, if he could ask Moon for advice. And then ‘in a low voice, sulkily, as though he were ashamed’ he narrated to Moon the tale that followed.

Knobby and Saffary were inseparable when they arrived in FMS hunting for fortune. ‘Tom, a big, powerful fellow, simple, very honest, hard-working; and Knobby, ungainly, but curiously attractive, with his deep-set eyes, hollow cheeks, and large humorous mouth’. Saffary had married first. He met Violet when he went to England on vacation. He fell in love with her ‘because she was alone in the world and his tender heart was touched by the thought of the drab life that lay before her’. Knobby married because ‘Tom had and he felt lost without him’.

Last night, when Saffary went home from the club, where he had learnt of Knobby’s death, he found it difficult to give this rotten news to Violet. 

Her reaction dumbfounded Tom. All the colour drained from Violet’s face as she stared at him long. And then ‘she gave a piercing cry and fell headlong to the floor. She had fainted dead away.’ Saffary nursed her back to consciousness. She was distraught, and didn’t want to be consoled by Saffary, ‘Don’t touch me’, she cried and moaned inconsolably, ‘What shall I do? I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it’. She was besides herself, ‘Go away, I tell you. Go away’. She cried at Saffary.

And then the penny dropped. As Saffary looked at her ‘tortured face, he started as though he saw in it something that appalled him’.

Saffary, in a fit of distress and restlessness, forced Violet to tell him the truth. When she confessed that Knobby and she were lovers, he struck her repeatedly till she fell down unconscious. In a moment he was contrite for his beastly conduct. Violet told him all about herself and Knobby.

After their marriages, Saffary had managed to get Knobby a rubber plantation next to his. Tom, Violet, Knobby, and his wife, Enid, got along very well, ‘They went everywhere together. Tom Saffary thought it grand’.

Knobby Clarke and Violet lived in this intimacy for three years before they fell in love with each other. They now deeply enjoyed each other’s company, even when surrounded by other people. They made love, infrequently, whenever they could snatch a moment away from Tom and Enid, and such opportunities were few and far. But ‘the sexual act was no more than an affirmation of the union of their souls’. When alone in each other’s company, they seldom talked about Tom and Enid. It was strange that the people with whom they spent most of their days seemed inconsequential in their lives. ‘Beauty now excitingly kindled the pleasant humdrum life they had led so long.’

But their joys did not last long. Enid discovered that she was pregnant. Violet’s world came tumbling down. Anguish seized her heart. She had not realised that all the while she and Knobby were in love, Saffary and Enid  were leading a normal married life. Violet gradually understood that while it was easy for a woman to feign passion - as she had to Tom's healthy needs - even when none existed, this dissimulation was difficult for the husband - as it must have been for Knobby. Violet decided that they could not be lovers any long. Though disconsolate for a time, both she and Knobby, had agreed to bear their fate with fortitude.

Knobby and Enid had sailed for England in a few days for her confinement.

When Moon asked Saffary, what he will do now, Saffary said he wanted Moon’s advice on this. Saffary was a kindly soul, but of provincial and hackneyed sensibilities. He felt he must divorce Violet now.

George Moon while listening to Saffary’s tale was reminded of his past life. Few people knew that he was once married and had divorced his wife, before coming to FMS.

Moon told him of his past marriage. He had met his ex-wife recently, when he was in England, and they had lunch together. He had found her a jolly, mirthful, fat old lady. She had married again and seemed contended with life. She had no rancour for Moon. 

She had been a beauty when they married. She was an ebullient, cheery girl with a string of admirers around her. They used to have frightful rows and then Moon, one day, found her out. He divorced her. ‘I know I was a damned fool’, he tells Saffary. He now realises that if he had had a little sense he should ‘have shut his eyes. She’d have settled down and made (him) an excellent wife’.

Saffary was appalled, ‘But one has one’s honour to think of.’ ‘Honour be damned’, Moon burst out. ‘One has one’s happiness to think of’.

Saffary is dumbfounded on hearing Moon talking like this. ‘I suppose that’s what they call a cynic’.

Maugham, now, put in Moon’s mouth words he strongly believed: ‘If to look truth in the face and not resent it when it’s unpalatable, and take human nature as you find it, smiling when it’s absurd and grieved without exaggeration when it’s pitiful, is to be cynical, then I suppose I’m a cynic. Mostly human nature is both absurd and pitiful, but if life has taught you tolerance you find in it more to smile at than to weep’.

 

Both stories are woven around an anecdote: Olive’s unfathomable grief when she comes to know of Tim’s marriage, and Violet’s heightened torment when she learns of Knobby’s death. These clinch the theme instantly. Tale unwaveringly moves in a straight line and one reads the last sentence of the story with an immense satisfaction, knowing that he has been told all that was worth knowing about the story that writer had set out to narrate.

Maugham’s stories are the paragon of the qualities, which according to Edgar Allan Poe, make a story: ‘a piece of fiction dealing with a single incident, material or spiritual, that can be read at a sitting; it must sparkle or impress, it must have unity of effect or impression; it should move in an even line from its exposition to its close.’