THE VAN Dorth Hotel at Singapore was far from grand.
The bedrooms were dingy and the mosquito nets patched and darned; the bath-houses, all in a row and detached from the bedrooms, were dank and smelly.
But it had character.
The people who stayed there, masters of tramps whose round ended at Singapore, mining engineers out of a job, and planters taking a holiday, to my mind bore a more romantic air than the smart folk, globe-trotters, government officials and their wives, wealthy merchants, who gave luncheon-parties at the Europe and played golf and danced and were fashionable.
The Van Dorth had a billiard-room, with a table with a threadbare cloth, where ships’ engineers and clerks in insurance offices played snooker.
The dining-room was large and bare and silent.
Dutch families on the way to Sumatra ate solidly through their dinner without exchanging a word with one another, and single gentlemen on a business trip from Batavia devoured a copious meal while they intently read their paper.
On two days a week there was rijstafel and then a few residents of Singapore who had a fancy for this dish came for tiffin.
The Van Dorth Hotel should have been a depressing place, but somehow it wasn’t; its quaintness saved it.
It had a faint aroma of something strange and half-forgotten.
There was a scrap of garden facing the street where you could sit in the shade of trees and drink cold beer.
In that crowded and busy city, though motors whizzed past and rickshaws passed continuously, the coolies’ feet pattering on the road and their bells ringing, it had the remote peacefulness of a corner of Holland.
It was the third time I had stayed at the Van Dorth.
I had been told about it first by the skipper of a Dutch tramp, the S.S. Utrecht, on which I had travelled from Merauke in New Guinea to Macassar.
The journey took the best part of a month, since the ship stopped at a number of islands in the Malay Archipelago, the Aru and the Kei Islands, Banda-Neira, Amboina, and others of which I have even forgotten the names, sometimes for an hour or two, sometimes for a day, to take on or discharge cargo.
It was a charming, monotonous and diverting trip.
When we dropped anchor, the agent came out in his launch, and generally the Dutch Resident, and we gathered on deck under the awning and the captain ordered beer.
The news of the island was exchanged for the news of the world.
We brought papers and mail.
If we were staying long enough the Resident asked us to dinner and, leaving the ship in charge of the second officer, we all (the captain, the chief officer, the engineer, the supercargo, and I) piled into the launch and went ashore. We spent a merry evening.
These little islands, one so like another, allured my fancy just because I knew that I should never see them again.
It made them strangely unreal, and as we sailed away and they vanished into the sea and sky it was only by an effort of the imagination that I could persuade myself that they did not with my last glimpse of them cease to exist.
But there was nothing illusive, mysterious, or fantastic about the captain, the chief officer, the chief engineer, and the supercargo.
Their solidity was amazing.
They were the four fattest men I ever saw.
At first I had great difficulty in telling them apart, for though one, the supercargo, was dark and the others were fair, they looked astonishingly alike.
They were all big, with large round bare red faces, with large fat arms and large fat legs and large fat bellies.
When they went ashore they buttoned up their stengah-shifters and then their great double chins bulged over the collars and they looked as though they would choke.
But generally they wore them unbuttoned.
They sweated freely and wiped their shiny faces with bandanas and vigorously fanned themselves with palm-leaf fans.
It was a treat to see them at tiffin.
Their appetites were enormous.
They had rijstafel every day, and each seemed to vie with the other how high he could pile his plate.
They loved it hot and strong.
“In dis country you can’t eat a ting onless it’s tasty,” said the skipper.
“De only way to keep yourself up in dis country is to eat hearty,” said the chief.
They were the greatest friends, all four of them; they were like schoolboys together, playing absurd little pranks with one another.
They knew each other’s jokes by heart and no sooner did one of them start the familiar lines than he would splutter with laughter so violently, the heavy shaking laughter of the fat man, that he could not go on. And then the others began to laugh too.
They rolled about in their chairs, and grew redder and redder, hotter and hotter, till the skipper shouted for beer, and each, gasping but happy, drank his bottle in one enchanted draught.
They had been on this run together for five years and when, a little time before, the chief officer had been offered a ship of his own he refused it.
He would not leave his companions.
They had made up their minds that when the first of them retired they would all retire.
“All friends and a good ship.
Good grub and good beer.
Vot can a sensible man vant more?”
At first they were a little stand-offish with me.
Although the ship had accommodation for half a dozen passengers, they did not often get any, and never one whom they did not know.
I was a stranger and a foreigner.
They liked their bit of fun and did not want anyone to interfere with it.
But they were all of them very fond of bridge, and on occasion the chief and the engineer had duties that prevented one or the other playing.