All of a sudden there broke out a strange though familiar sound, so close and doomful. What doom it foreboded they felt at once, but their brains were loath to believe it.
The sound was repeated. It was the cry of the infant. The merchant made a kindly face and said: ‘Baby is crying....’
‘Lull him, my dear’, said he, rushing to the mother. ‘You will cause the death of us all.’
Everybody’s chest and throat gasped with faintness. The mother marched up and down the cellar lulling and coaxing.
‘You must not cry; sleep, my golden one ... It is I, your mother ... my heart....’
But the child cried on obstinately, wildly. There must have been something in the mother’s face that was not calculated to produce a tranquilizing effect.
And now, in this warm and strange underground atmosphere, the woman’s brain wrenched out a wild, mad, idea. It seemed to her that she had read it in the eyes, in the suffering silence of these unknown people. And these unhappy, frightened men understood that she was thinking of them. They understood it by the unutterably mournful tenderness with which she chanted, while drinking in the infant’s eyes with her own.
‘He will soon fall asleep. I know. It is always like that; he cries for a moment, then he falls asleep at once. He is a very quiet boy.’ She addressed the tall man with a painful, insinuating smile. From outside there broke in a distant noise. Then came a thud, and a crack, shaking the air.
‘They are searching’, whispered the schoolboy.
But the infant went on crying hopelessly.