Then Ingeborg did slowly open her eyes--it seemed as if she could hardly lift their heavy lids--and looked at Robert as though she were looking at him from an immense distance. Her mouth remained open; her face was vacant. Frau Dosch seized the bundle, and with clucking sounds jerked it up and down between the faces of the parents so that its mother's eyes must needs fall upon it. Its red contents began to cry. "Ah--there now--now we shall see," exclaimed Frau Dosch, who had been secretly perturbed by the newborn's absence of comment while it was being washed and swaddled. "The first cry of our son," said Herr Dremmel, kissing Ingeborg's hand with deep emotion. "_Now_ we will try," said Frau Dosch, once more laying the baby on Ingeborg's chest and folding her arm round it. This time she took the precaution to hold the mother's arm firmly in position herself. "Oh, the splendid fellow!" she exclaimed. "Frau Pastor, what do you say to your eldest son?" But Frau Pastor said nothing. Her eyelids drooped over her eyes again, and shut the world and all its vigours out. The sound of these people round her bed came to her from far away. There was a singing in her ears, a black remoteness in her soul. Somewhere from behind the vast sea of nothingness in which she seemed to sink, through the constant singing in her ears, came little faint voices with words. She wanted to listen, she wanted to listen, why would these people interrupt her--the same words over and over again, faintly throbbing in a rhythm like the rhythm of the wheels of the train that had brought her through the night long ago across Europe to her German home, only very distant, tiny, muffled--"From battle and murder"--yes, she had caught that--"from all women labouring with child"--yes--"from all sick persons"--yes--"and young children"--yes, go on--"Good Lord deliver us"--oh, yes--please.... Good Lord deliver us--please--please--deliver us.... "Perhaps a little brandy?" suggested Herr Dremmel, puzzled. "Brandy! If her own son cannot cheer her--Does the Herr Pastor then not know that one gives nothing at first to a lady lying-in but water-soup?" Herr Dremmel, feeling ignorant, let go the idea of brandy. "Her hand is rather cold," he said, almost apologetically, for who knew but what it was cold because it ought to be? Frau Dosch expressed the opinion that it was not, and that if it were it was not so cold as her heart. "See here," she said, "see this beautiful boy addressing his mother in the only language he knows, and she not even looking at him. Come, my little fellow--come, then--we are not wanted--come with Aunt Dosch--the old Aunt Dosch--" And she took the baby off Ingeborg's passive chest, and after a few turns with it up and down the room slapping the underside of its swaddle in a way experience had taught choked out crying, put it in the pale blue cradle that stood ready on two chairs.