'Outstation' -The snobs and the outcasts

In his forties, Maugham settled in the village of Cap Ferrat on the French Riviera, the Mediterranean coast of France. The house, La Villa Mauresque – so named by him because of its North African origins - was built on a thickly wooded promontory, jutting out to the sea. It commanded a staggering view of the Mediterranean. A large squarish room, the lone structure on a broad flat roof, was his study. It afforded him the seclusion he wanted as he wrote. He retreated here every morning from 9.00 to 12.30.

Writing was his life – ‘I have never been able to persuade myself that anything else mattered.’ He was a punctilious man.  He strictly adhered to three hours of writing every day, no less, no more, and wrote about 1000 – 1500 words daily. Every wall of the room had large French windows that framed the views of the blue Mediterranean and his lush terrace garden, but for the one facing his desk that had its windows shuttered to prevent distraction while writing. 

Maugham spent months, sometimes years, on a story in his mind, before he wrote it down. Thus, he did not need an outline before the main draft. Once he began, he wrote fast.

I can, with ease, picture the ageing author sitting on his chair facing the eight-foot, seventeenth century Spanish desk, and scribbling on the unruled white paper, with black inked fountain pen, word after word, stories of a shopworn life, in a far off South Sea island, caught in the web of a whimsical fate – as clear sketches of some of the finest characters in the twentieth-century fiction emerged on the sheets, alike the bright rays of sun from the limpid blue mediterranean sky that fell on his desk as he wrote.

 

‘Outstation’ is the story of two strange personalities, anathema to one-another, who are thrown together on a remote island in the Federated Malay States.

Mr Warburton, the Resident, awaits the arrival of his assistant on the island. He is apprehensive, for ‘he had been so long the only white man there that he could not face the arrival of another without misgiving’. First impression of Cooper, the new resident, was not favourable.

Cooper was a gangly fellow of scruffy bearing – ‘he was dressed in Khaki shorts and a khaki shirt, but they were shabby and soiled, and his battered topee had not been cleaned for days’. Mr Warburton had come to the landing stage where the prahu carrying Cooper was to land, smartly dressed in spotless ducks and white shoes, a solar topee, and carried in his arm a gold-headed Malacca cane. ‘We’ll see what he looks like when he comes to dinner,’ Mr Warburton struggled not to form an opinion of his new assistant.

Cooper presented at dinner in the same attire in which he had landed. Mr Warburton was fully decked up in his dinner jacket, high-collar shirt, silk socks, and leather shoes. Cooper could not hide the twinkle of his amusement and said, ‘I very nearly put on a sarong’. This angered Mr Warburton. He gave Cooper a piece of his mind, ‘When a white man surrenders in the slightest degree to the influences that surround him he very soon loses his self-respect, and when he loses his self-respect, you may be quite sure the natives will soon cease to respect him’.

Dinner was grandly laid. Menu was written in French, food was sumptuous, and they were waited on by many Malayan boys. Officiously formal Mr Warburton and the splendid service discomfited Cooper. Mr Warburton derived ‘a slightly malicious amusement in the embarrassment which’ he had occasioned in his assistant.

Mr Warburton was aghast at the quality of men the empire was recruiting in FMS. Cooper told him that he was in war, but in the ranks. That was abominable. An assistant who was not even commissioned! He thought Cooper was ‘envious, ill-bred fellow, bumptious, self-assertive, and vain.’

Way back in England, Mr Warburton, as a young man, had come into a sizable inheritance when he left Oxford. He had given into the high society of London with a zeal that only a dyed-in-the-wool snob can.

‘For Mr Warburton was a snob. He was not a timid snob, a little ashamed of being impressed by his betters, … nor a snob who was dazzled by riches, he was the naked, unadulterated common snob who dearly loved a lord. … he would much rather have been snubbed by a person of quality than flattered by a commoner.’

He had inherited his sumptuous income from a relative of his mother, a hardworking manufacturer of Liverpool. But he was loath to let his name crop up in any social gathering. While, he used all his charm to mention his distant relationship to a noble family.

But he had a simplicity of nature as he pursued the high and mighty of society. He was free with his money. He generously helped his, often pecunious, noble acquaintances, never bothering about the money he recklessly spent on them. Little did he know that these smart friends laughed at him behind his back.

His extravagant indulgence in the decadent aristocracy soon brought him to financial ruin. He had sincerely adopted the false pretences of the class he courted and was too proud to ask his friends for help. The only favour he sought was a reference to the Sultan of Sembulu for service in FMS, the sole recourse for a young man in his position. Once he received the offer, he quietly packed his bag and joined his station.

Though thousands of kilometres away from England, ‘he never lost his love for titled persons’, and pursued with keen interest minute events in their lives, births, marriages, parties, and deaths, through The Times that reached him six weeks late. Most people, when they received the bundle of papers, tore down the wrapper and taking the last one, first glanced at the latest news. Not Mr Warburton. His agent had instructions to write on the wrapper the date of the paper. His head boy’s orders were to put only one paper, the earliest one, on the breakfast table every day. Thus, Mr Warburton read on Monday, the Monday Times, but of six weeks back. On Sundays he read The Observer. This way, he maintained an illusion of being in the country he loved dearly. ‘He kept up a busy correspondence with various great ladies and his letters were amusing and chatty.’

Mr Warburton was also a kindly and a generous person. He had come to love and respect the proud Malays and went out of his way to be good to them. But he ‘never forgot that he was an English gentleman, and he had no patience with the white men who yielded to native customs’. When he went to England on vacation he found it much changed. His friends, like him, had grown old and crusty. But Borneo remained the same. It was his home now. He had decided to remain in service as long as possible. ‘He had stated in his will that wherever he died he wished his body to be brought back to Sembulu, and buried among the people he loved within the sound of the softly flowing river.’

Cooper had been raised in a colony – he was born in Barbados. All his life he had nurtured a grudge against the elites. He believed that he was given a raw deal in life because he was not one among them. He particularly disliked the public-school type and dreaded being patronised by them. He was honest, efficient, and hardworking but had no patience with natives whom he treated with contempt and rashly. It perplexed Mr Warburton to note that ‘this man who looked upon himself as everyone’s equal should look upon so many men as his own inferiors’. Cooper was a bully.

Mr Warburton saw early that Cooper was a good worker. He tried to court him socially. He would invite him to lavish meals at home. He would try to regale him with tales of his proximity with the nobles and aristocracy in England. Cooper had heard most of these tales at Kuala Salor from Mr Warburton’s friends. They used to laugh at him.  Cooper would try to feign interest in his tales but when Mr Warburton would not stop, he would come out with an obnoxious remark about the lords Mr Warburton worshipped – ‘I don’t give a row of pins for a lord. What’s wrong with England is snobbishness. And if there’s anything that gets my goat it’s a snob’.

Excessive disdain for gentlemen, a bullish demeanour, disagreeable behaviour in their presence, and an attempt to constantly portray himself opposed to their ways of life was Cooper’s defence against the injustices and scorn he perceived these people had heaped on him. He was a sensitive person. Often, when he got back to his bungalow, after a scuffle with Mr Warburton, he would fall on his bed face down ‘and in his bitter loneliness on a sudden (loose) all control of himself. Painful sobs tore his chest and heavy tears rolled down his thin cheeks’ on such occasions.

Cooper and Mr Warburton, gradually, stopped all communication with one another. They were thrown together for official work but limited this to minimum. Warburton heard from his head-boy – whose nephew, Abas, worked for Cooper – about Cooper’s denigrating ways with his boys. He also told Mr Warburton that all Cooper’s boys had left him but for Abas, and he too was requesting to be relieved. Mr Warburton tried to advise and caution Cooper once but he pooh-poohed his concerns with some contemptuous remarks.

Once, on a matter relating to prisoners who had been working as labour, Warburton reversed a particularly cruel and unjust decision of Cooper. Cooper was livid and confronted Mr Warburton. They almost came to blows. Cooper in rage shouted at Warburton before he left, ‘You snob. … You thought me a cad because I hadn’t been to Eton. Oh! They told me in KS what to expect. … you are the laughing stock of the whole country. I would rather be a cad than the snob you are.’

Mr Warburton was hot with shame and misery. He pictured his friends laughing at him as they sat in the club in the evenings drinking whiskies. A Snob! They thought him a snob.

He couldn’t work with Cooper. He wrote to Sultan’s English representative that Cooper and he were getting on each other’s nerves constantly and Cooper should be given another appointment. Representative wrote back saying that Cooper was a capable worker. Perhaps, Mr Warburton was ‘a little too much inclined to attach importance to a man’s social position’. He advised him to be tolerant.

Mr Warburton understood the rebuff and suddenly felt life a burden.

He soon came to know that Cooper had been extremely nasty with Abas, who again wanted to leave him. Cooper withheld his wages. When Abas protested he accused him of stealing from his house, and physically threw him out.

Abas’s uncle, Mr Warburton’s head boy, complained to him, the same evening. ‘There would be a misfortune’ he said to Mr Warburton ominously. Mr Warburton knew how sensitive Malays were about honour and ridicule. He could have sent a word to caution Cooper. He vacillated. He had warned him, but Cooper would not heed. He had cautioned the Sultan too, but to no avail. He saw his chance. He told his head boy that Abas had his permission to leave.

In the morning, Cooper was found in his bed with a kris in his heart. The same noon, Abas was caught in his village. He confessed to the crime. But, the provocation for the crime being great, Mr Warburton sentenced him only to a term of imprisonment.

The next day, Mr Warburton felt as if a weight had been lifted off his mind. For the first time in months, he was peaceful as he cut open the wrapper of the paper on his breakfast table. He looked at the announcements of births, death, and marriages, in his Times, with interest. He always read these columns first.

 

Maugham belonged to a professional class. But from his young days as a writer, he had come into contact with the titled gentry of England. For, it was a custom in high-society then to invite promising writers to the week-end parties. As his fame grew and he began earning a voluptuous income he became a part of this elite class. He may have imbibed many of their ways, but he never felt he belonged among them. His cynicism, keen perception of absurdities in human nature, and his discerning eye for humour and tragedy, both in one life, equipped him with a unique insight to observe these effete, cocooned people, insouciantly and conceitedly slipping down their ultimate extinction. He created a few staggeringly fascinating snobs in his work. Elliott Templeton, the expatriate American art-dealer of Razor’s Edge, is his most memorable snob.

Snobs have lived in every age and in every society. Demise of the aristocracy did not usher their annihilation. Aristocracy’s place was taken by the rich and the powerful. I served in the armed forces for more than a quarter of a century. The rigidly hierarchical structure of the organisation was a fertile soil for these social climbers and they thrived with abundance. I had no attributes to emulate or be one; I found them insufferable. But Maugham’s portrait of snobs showed me how to look at the comic aspect of this hobnobbing, toadying, obsequious person. And glimpse the equally tragic and vacuous world of their thoughts that ascribes exalted position to a person because of his birth, status, or money.