Herr Pastor stepped across, and found Ingeborg shivering with such astonishing energy that the bed did, as Ilse had described, rattle threateningly. In reply to his questions Ilse told him, for Ingeborg was too busy shaking to explain, that nothing had happened except that Frau Pastor said she was thirsty and would like a glass of cold water, and she had fetched it fresh from the pump and Frau Pastor had asked to be held up to drink it and had drunk it all at one draught and immediately fallen back and begun this shaking. "Ingeborg, what is this?" said Herr Dremmel with a show of severity, for he had heard severity acted as a sedative on those who, for instance, shake. When, however, Ingeborg, instead of replying like a reasonable being, continued to shake and seem unaware of his presence, and when on touching her he found that in spite of the shivering she was extremely hot, he sent Johann for Frau Dosch, who on seeing her could only suggest that Johann should drive on into Meuk and bring out the doctor. And so it was that Ingeborg, coming suddenly out of a thin, high confusion in which she seemed to have been hurrying since the world began, found it was night, for lamps were alight, and people--many people--were round her bed, and one was a man she did not know with a short black beard. But she did know him. It was the doctor. It flashed across her instantly. Then she had really got to being in extremity. That woman had said so, that big woman who used to come and see her in the garden long ago. And Ilse--that was Ilse at the foot of the bed crying. When one was in extremity Ilse did cry. She found herself stroking the doctor's beard and begging him not to let go of her. She was reminded that it was unusual to stroke the doctor's beard by his drawing back, but she thought it silly not to let one's beard be stroked if somebody wanted to. She heard herself saying, "Don't let go of me--please--don't let go of me--please--" but it seemed that he could not hold her, for she was caught away almost immediately again into that thin, hot, hurrying confusion, high up in the treble, high up at the very top, where all the violins were insisting together over and over again on one thin, quivering, anxious note.... "It is impossible," said the doctor, a Jew from Königsberg, lately married and set up at Menk, looking at Frau Dosch, "that this should have happened." And he proceeded to explain to Herr Dremmel that the child in future would have to seek its nourishment in tins. "What?" exclaimed Herr Dremmel. "Tins," said the doctor. "Tins? For my son? When there are cows in the world? Cows, which at least more closely resemble mothers than tins?"