They were willing to put up with me when they discovered that I was ready to make a fourth whenever I was wanted.
Their bridge was as incredibly fantastic as they were.
They played for infinitesimal stakes, five cents a hundred: they did not want to win one another’s money, they said, it was the game they liked.
But what a game!
Each was wildly determined to play the hand and hardly one was dealt without at least a small slam being declared.
The rule was that if you could get a peep at somebody else’s cards you did, and if you could get away with a revoke you told your partner when there was no danger it could be claimed and you both roared with laughter till the tears rolled down your fat cheeks.
But if your partner had insisted on taking the bid away from you and had called a grand slam on five spades to the queen, whereas you were positive on your seven little diamonds you could have made it easily, you could always score him off by redoubling without a trick in your hand.
He went down two or three thousand and the glasses on the table danced with the laughter that shook your opponents.
I could never remember their difficult Dutch names, but knowing them anonymously as it were, only by the duties they performed, as one knows the characters Pantaloon, Harlequin, and Punchinello, of the old Italian comedy, added grotesquely to their drollery.
The mere sight of them, all four together, set you laughing, and I think they got a good deal of amusement from the astonishment they caused in strangers.
They boasted that they were the four most famous Dutchmen in the East Indies.
To me not the least comic part of them was their serious side.
Sometimes late at night, when they had given up all pretence of still wearing their uniforms, and one or the other of them lay by my side on a long chair in a pyjama jacket and a sarong, he would grow sentimental.
The chief engineer, due to retire soon, was meditating marriage with a widow whom he had met when last he was home and spending the rest of his life in a little town with old red-brick houses on the shores of the Zuyder Zee.
But the captain was very susceptible to the charms of the native girls and his thick English became almost unintelligible from emotion when he described to me the effect they had on him.
One of these days he would buy himself a house on the hills in Java and marry a pretty little Javanese.
They were so small and so gentle and they made no noise, and he would dress her in silk sarongs and give her gold chains to wear round her neck and gold bangles to put on her arms.
But the chief mocked him.
“Silly all dat is.
Silly.
She goes mit all your friends and de house boys and everybody.
By de time you retire, my dear, vot you’ll vant vill be a nurse, not a vife.”
“Me?” cried the skipper. “I shall want a vife ven I’m eighty!”
He had picked up a little thing last time the ship was at Macassar and as we approached that port he began to be all of a flutter.
The chief officer shrugged fat and indulgent shoulders.
The captain was always losing his head over one brazen hussy after another, but his passion never survived the interval between one stop at a port and the next, and then the chief was called in to smooth out the difficulties that ensued.
And so it would be this time.
“De old man suffers from fatty degeneration of de heart.
But so long as I’m dere to look after him not much harm comes of it.
He vastes his money and dat’s a pity, but as long as he’s got it to vaste, why shouldn’t he?”
The chief officer had a philosophic soul.
At Macassar then I disembarked, and bade farewell to my four fat friends.
“Make another journey with us,” they said. “Come back next year or the year after.
You’ll find us all here just the same as ever.”
A good many months had passed since then and I had wandered through more than one strange land.
I had been to Bali and Java and Sumatra; I had been to Cambodia and Annam; and now, feeling as though I were home again, I sat in the garden of the Van Dorth Hotel.
It was cool in the very early morning and having had breakfast I was looking at back numbers of the Straits Times to find out what had been happening in the world since last I had been within reach of papers.
Nothing very much.
Suddenly my eyes caught a headline: The Utrecht Tragedy.
Supercargo and Chief Engineer. Not Guilty.
I read the paragraph carelessly and then I sat up.
The Utrecht was the ship of my four fat Dutchmen and apparently the supercargo and the chief engineer had been on trial for murder.
It couldn’t be my two fat friends.
The names were given, but the names meant nothing to me.
The trial had taken place in Batavia.
No details were given in this paragraph; it was only a brief announcement that after the judges had considered the speeches of the prosecution and of the defence their verdict was as stated.
I was astounded.
It was incredible that the men I knew could have committed a murder.
I could not find out who had been murdered.
I looked through back numbers of the paper. Nothing.