THE TERRACE
669
memory. We won't miss a single party. My wife and I have
always had the best opinion of you, I want you to know. We
never believed you ever tried to poison anybody. Miss Slingsby
didn't think so either."
Matilda made a strange movement and broke away from
him.
"Maybe," said the chauffeur, "I have stirred up the ashes
of your old memories, without meaning to. Please excuse me."
Matilda said that she did not feel well and would prefer to
return to Arner's table. The chauffeur accompanied her. She sat
down beside the attorney, thinking about her husband Bob who
had suffered the effects of the poison she had given
him
some
time back. He suffered the effects, but did not die.
Meanwhile the two men-the director and Arner-were
still talking about the Zuni Indians.
"For the Indians water is also a divine element," said Arner
and added, looking at his friend's nose: "And also fishing birds."
Matilda remembered, in spite of the fact that the chauffeur
did not believe it, that she had indeed tried to poison both her
husbands. But that had happened during her lunar days. Maybe
she could be forgiven if what Dr. Arner had told her were true.
At that moment they called Dr. Smith from another table and
the physician left. The attorney continued with the Indian theme.
At another table nearby a patient was lowering her head
and raising her shoulders from time to time with a convulsive
movement. Matilda said that the poor dear heard airplanes in
the air and thought that they were passing dangerously near her
head. Then Mrs. Strolheirn fell silent, thinking about her second
husband Bob. She had not received any flowers from him for
some time. And she said in a loud voice:
"He usually sends them to me from the most faraway places.
In special plastic boxes. From Holland, Spain, Turkey."
She sighed and said that her husband had gone somewhere ·
with
his
elastic night and a small tube of cyanide of mercury
in his pocket, but he sent her flowers and sometimes books along
