"Shut up, boy! There's time enough for that when you're seventy.... Yes, Grandmamma de Laders, Grandmamma Dercksz: I can remember her in India fifty years ago."
"O my God, what a time to remember things!" said Lot, shuddering.
"Take some more champagne, if it makes your flesh creep.... Fifty years ago, I was little more than a boy, I was twenty. Grandmamma was still a fine woman, well over forty. She became a widow quite young, on the death of her first husband. Well, let's see: when Dercksz was drowned, she was ... about ... thirty-six.... Then Mamma was born."
"What a long, long time ago that was!" said Lot. "It makes one giddy to look back upon."
"That's sixty, yes, sixty years ago now," said Pauws, dreamily. "I was a child then, ten years old. I still remember the incident. I was at Semarang; my father was in the paymaster's department. My people knew the Derckszes. The thing was talked about. I was a child, but it made an impression on me. It was very much talked about, it was talked about for years and years after. There was a question of exhuming the body. They decided that it was too late. At that time, he had been buried for months. They said that ..."
"That a native ... with a kris ... because of a woman...?"
"Yes; and they said more than that. They said that Takma had been to the pasangrahan that evening and that Grandmamma.... But what's the use of talking about it? What can it matter to you? Elly's as white as a sheet—child, how pale you look!—and Lot is shivering all over his body, though it happened so long ago."
"Should you say that those old people ... are hiding something?"
"Probably," said Pauws. "Come, let's have some champagne and not talk about it any more. They themselves have forgotten it all by this time. When you get as old as that ..."
"You become dulled," said Lot.