The Plague — Chapter 28

hen next day, a few days before the date xed for the opening of the gates, Dr. Rieux came home at noon, he wasW wondering if the telegram he was expecting had arrived. Though his days were no less strenuous than at the height of the epidemic, the prospect of imminent release had obliterated his fatigue. Hope had returned and with it a new zest for life. No man can live on the stretch all the time, with his energy and will-power strained to the breaking-point, and it is a joy to be able to relax at last and loosen nerves and muscles that were braced for the struggle. If the telegram, too, that he awaited brought good news, Rieux would be able to make a fresh start. Indeed, he had a feeling that everyone in those days was making a fresh start.

He walked past the concierge’s room in the hall. The new man, old Michel’s successor, his face pressed to the window looking on the hall, gave him a smile. As he went up the stairs, the man’s face, pale with exhaustion and privation, but smiling, hovered before his eyes.

Yes, he’d make a fresh start, once the period of “abstractions” was over, and with any luck— He was opening the door with these thoughts in his mind when he saw his mother coming down the hall to meet him. M. Tarrou, she told him, wasn’t well. He had risen at the usual time, but did not feel up to going out and had returned to bed. Mme. Rieux felt worried about him.

“Quite likely it’s nothing serious,” her son said.

Tarrou was lying on his back, his heavy head deeply indenting the pillow, the coverlet bulging above his massive chest. His head was

aching and his temperature up. The symptoms weren’t very denite, he told Rieux, but they might well be those of plague.

After examining him Rieux said: “No, there’s nothing denite as yet.”

But Tarrou also suered from a raging thirst, and in the hallway the doctor told his mother that it might be plague.

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “Surely that’s not possible, not now!” And after a moment added: “Let’s keep him here, Bernard.”

Rieux pondered. “Strictly speaking, I’ve no right to do that,” he said doubtfully. “Still, the gates will be opened quite soon. If you weren’t here, I think I’d take it on myself.”

“Bernard, let him stay, and let me stay too. You know, I’ve just had another inoculation.”

The doctor pointed out that Tarrou, too, had had inoculations, though it was possible, tired as he was, he’d overlooked the last one or omitted to take the necessary precautions.

Rieux was going to the surgery as he spoke, and when he returned to the bedroom Tarrou noticed that he had a box of the big

ampoules containing the serum.

“Ah, so it is that,” he said.

“Not necessarily; but we mustn’t run any risks.”

Without replying Tarrou extended his arm and submitted to the prolonged injections he himself had so often administered to others.

“We’ll judge better this evening.” Rieux looked Tarrou in the eyes.

“But what about isolating me, Rieux?”

“It’s by no means certain that you have plague.”

Tarrou smiled with an eort.

“Well, it’s the rst time I’ve known you to do the injection without ordering the patient o to the isolation ward.”

Rieux looked away.

“You’ll be better here. My mother and I will look after you.”

Tarrou said nothing and the doctor, who was putting away the ampoules in the box, waited for him to speak before looking round.

But still Tarrou said nothing, and nally Rieux went up to the bed.

The sick man was gazing at him steadily, and though his face was drawn, the gray eyes were calm. Rieux smiled down on him.

“Now try to sleep. I’ll be back soon.”

As he was going out he heard Tarrou calling, and turned back.

Tarrou’s manner had an odd eect, as though he were at once trying to keep back what he had to say and forcing himself to say it.

“Rieux,” he said at last, “you must tell me the whole truth. I count

on that.”

“I promise it.”

Tarrou’s heavy face relaxed in a brief smile.

“Thanks. I don’t want to die, and I shall put up a ght. But if I lose the match, I want to make a good end of it.”

Bending forward, Rieux pressed his shoulder.

“No. To become a saint, you need to live. So ght away!”

In the course of that day the weather, which after being very cold had grown slightly milder, broke in a series of violent hailstorms followed by rain. At sunset the sky cleared a little, and it was bitterly cold again. Rieux came home in the evening. His overcoat still on, he entered his friend’s bedroom. Tarrou did not seem to have moved, but his set lips, drained white by fever, told of the

eort he was keeping up.

“Well?” Rieux asked.

Tarrou raised his broad shoulders a little out of the bedclothes.

“Well,” he said, “I’m losing the match.”

The doctor bent over him. Ganglia had formed under the burning skin and there was a rumbling in his chest, like the sound of a hidden forge. The strange thing was that Tarrou showed symptoms of both varieties of plague at once.

Rieux straightened up and said the serum hadn’t yet had time to take eect. An uprush of fever in his throat drowned the few words that Tarrou tried to utter.

After dinner Rieux and his mother took up their posts at the sick man’s bedside. The night began with a struggle, and Rieux knew that this grim wrestling with the angel of plague was to last until dawn. In this struggle Tarrou’s robust shoulders and chest were not his greatest assets; rather, the blood that had spurted under Rieux’s needle and, in this blood, that something more vital than the soul, which no human skill can bring to light. The doctor’s task could be

only to watch his friend’s struggle. As to what he was about to do, the stimulants to inject, the abscesses to stimulate—many months’ repeated failures had taught him to appreciate such expedients at their true value. Indeed, the only way in which he might help was to provide opportunities for the benecence of chance, which too often stays dormant unless roused to action. Luck was an ally he could not dispense with. For Rieux was confronted by an aspect of the plague that baed him. Yet again it was doing all it could to confound the tactics used against it; it launched attacks in unexpected places and retreated from those where it seemed denitely lodged. Once more it was out to darken counsel.

Tarrou struggled without moving. Not once in the course of the night did he counter the enemy’s attacks by restless agitation; only with all his stolid bulk, with silence, did he carry on the ght. Nor did he even try to speak, thus intimating, after his fashion, that he could no longer let his attention stray. Rieux could follow the vicissitudes of the struggle only in his friend’s eyes, now open and now shut; in the eyelids, now more closely welded to the eyeball, now distended; and in his gaze xed on some object in the room or brought back to the doctor and his mother. And each time it met the doctor’s gaze, with a great eort Tarrou smiled.

At one moment there came a sound of hurrying footsteps in the street. They were in ight before a distant throbbing which gradually approached until the street was loud with the clamor of the downpour; another rain-squall was sweeping the town, mingled presently with hailstones that clattered on the sidewalk. Window awnings were apping wildly. Rieux, whose attention had been diverted momentarily by the noises of the squall, looked again across the shadows at Tarrou’s face, on which fell the light of a small bedside lamp. His mother was knitting, raising her eyes now and then from her work to gaze at the sick man. The doctor had done everything that could be done. When the squall had passed, the silence in the room grew denser, lled only by the silent turmoil of the unseen battle. His nerves overwrought by sleeplessness, the doctor fancied he could hear, on the edge of the silence, that faint eerie sibilance which had haunted his ears ever since the beginning

of the epidemic. He made a sign to his mother, indicating she should go to bed. She shook her head, and her eyes grew brighter; then she examined carefully, at her needle-tips, a stitch of which she was unsure. Rieux got up, gave the sick man a drink, and sat down again.

Footsteps rang on the pavement, nearing, then receding; people were taking advantage of the lull to hurry home. For the rst time the doctor realized that this night, without the clang of ambulances and full of belated wayfarers, was just like a night of the past—a plague-free night. It was as if the pestilence, hounded away by cold, the street-lamps, and the crowd, had ed from the depths of the town and taken shelter in this warm room and was launching its last oensive at Tarrou’s inert body. No longer did it thresh the air above the houses with its ail. But it was whistling softly in the stagnant air of the sickroom, and this it was that Rieux had been hearing since the long vigil began. And now it was for him to wait and watch until that strange sound ceased here too, and here as well the plague confessed defeat.

A little before dawn Rieux leaned toward his mother and whispered: “You’d better have some rest now, as you’ll have to relieve me at eight. Mind you take your drops before going to bed.”

Mme. Rieux rose, folded her knitting, and went to the bedside.

Tarrou had had his eyes shut for some time. Sweat had plastered his hair on his stubborn forehead. Mme. Rieux sighed, and he opened his eyes. He saw the gentle face bent over him and, athwart the surge of fever, that steadfast smile took form again. But at once the eyes closed. Left to himself, Rieux moved into the chair his mother had just left. The street was silent and no sound came from the sleeping town. The chill of daybreak was beginning to make itself felt.

The doctor dozed o, but very soon an early cart rattling down the street awaked him. Shivering a little, he looked at Tarrou and saw that a lull had come; he, too, was sleeping. The iron-shod wheels rumbled away into the distance. Darkness still was pressing on the windowpanes. When the doctor came beside the bed, Tarrou

gazed at him with expressionless eyes, like a man still on the

frontier of sleep.

“You slept, didn’t you?” Rieux asked.

“Yes.”

“Breathing better?”

“A bit. Does that mean anything?”

Rieux kept silent for some moments; then he said: “No, Tarrou, it doesn’t mean anything. You know as well as I that there’s often a remission in the morning.”

“Thanks.” Tarrou nodded his approval. “Always tell me the exact truth.”

Rieux was sitting on the side of the bed. Beside him he could feel the sick man’s legs, sti and hard as the limbs of an egy on a tomb. Tarrou was breathing with more diculty.

“The fever’ll come back, won’t it, Rieux?” he gasped.

“Yes. But at noon we shall know where we stand.”

Tarrou shut his eyes; he seemed to be mustering up his strength.

There was a look of utter weariness on his face. He was waiting for the fever to rise and already it was stirring somewhat in the depths of his being. When he opened his eyes, his gaze was misted. It brightened only when he saw Rieux bending over him, a tumbler in

his hand.

“Drink.”

Tarrou drank, then slowly lowered his head on to the pillow.

“It’s a long business,” he murmured.

Rieux clasped his arm, but Tarrou, whose head was averted, showed no reaction. Then suddenly, as if some inner dike had given way without warning, the fever surged back, dyeing his cheeks and forehead. Tarrou’s eyes came back to the doctor, who, bending again, gave him a look of aectionate encouragement. Tarrou tried to shape a smile, but it could not force its way through the set jaws and lips welded by dry saliva. In the rigid face only the eyes lived still, glowing with courage.

At seven Mme. Rieux returned to the bedroom. The doctor went to the surgery to ring up the hospital and arrange for a substitute.

He also decided to postpone his consultations; then lay down for

some moments on the surgery couch. Five minutes later he went back to the bedroom. Tarrou’s face was turned toward Mme. Rieux, who was sitting close beside the bed, her hands folded on her lap; in the dim light of the room she seemed no more than a darker patch of shadow. Tarrou was gazing at her so intently that, putting a nger to her lips, Mme. Rieux rose and switched o the bedside lamp. Behind the curtains the light was growing, and presently, when the sick man’s face grew visible, Mme. Rieux could see his eyes still intent on her. Bending above the bed, she smoothed out the bolster and, as she straightened up, laid her hand for a moment on his moist, tangled hair. Then she heard a mued voice, which seemed to come from very far away, murmur: “Thank you,” and that all was well now. By the time she was back in her chair Tarrou had shut his eyes, and, despite the sealed mouth, a faint smile seemed to hover on the wasted face.

At noon the fever reached its climax. A visceral cough racked the sick man’s body and he now was spitting blood. The ganglia had ceased swelling, but they were still there, like lumps of iron embedded in the joints. Rieux decided that lancing them was impracticable. Now and then, in the intervals between bouts of fever and coughing ts, Tarrou still gazed at his friends. But soon his eyes opened less and less often and the glow that shone out from the ravaged face in the brief moments of recognition grew steadily fainter. The storm, lashing his body into convulsive movement, lit it up with ever rarer ashes, and in the heart of the tempest he was slowly drifting, derelict. And now Rieux had before him only a masklike face, inert, from which the smile had gone forever. This human form, his friend’s, lacerated by the spear-thrusts of the plague, consumed by searing, superhuman res, bueted by all the raging winds of heaven, was foundering under his eyes in the dark ood of the pestilence, and he could do nothing to avert the wreck.

He could only stand, unavailing, on the shore, empty-handed and sick at heart, unarmed and helpless yet again under the onset of calamity. And thus, when the end came, the tears that blinded Rieux’s eyes were tears of impotence; and he did not see Tarrou roll

over, face to the wall, and die with a short, hollow groan as if somewhere within him an essential chord had snapped.

The next night was not one of struggle but of silence. In the tranquil death-chamber, beside the dead body now in everyday clothing—here, too, Rieux felt it brooding, that elemental peace which, when he was sitting many nights before on the terrace high above the plague, had followed the brief foray at the gates. Then, already, it had brought to his mind the silence brooding over the beds in which he had let men die. There as here it was the same solemn pause, the lull that follows battle; it was the silence of defeat. But the silence now enveloping his dead friend, so dense, so much akin to the nocturnal silence of the streets and of the town set free at last, made Rieux cruelly aware that this defeat was nal, the last disastrous battle that ends a war and makes peace itself an ill beyond all remedy. The doctor could not tell if Tarrou had found peace, now that all was over, but for himself he had a feeling that no peace was possible to him henceforth, any more than there can be an armistice for a mother bereaved of her son or for a man who buries his friend.

The night was cold again, with frosty stars sparkling in a clear, wintry sky. And in the dimly lit room they felt the cold pressing itself to the windowpanes and heard the long, silvery suspiration of a polar night. Mme. Rieux sat near the bed in her usual attitude, her right side lit up by the bedside lamp. In the center of the room, outside the little zone of light, Rieux sat, waiting. Now and then thoughts of his wife waylaid him, but he brushed them aside each time.

When the night began, the heels of passers-by had rung briskly in the frozen air.

“Have you attended to everything?” Mme. Rieux had asked.

“Yes, I’ve telephoned.”

Then they had resumed their silent vigil. From time to time Mme.

Rieux stole a glance at her son, and whenever he caught her doing this, he smiled. Out in the street the usual night-time sounds bridged the long silences. A good many cars were on the road again, though ocially this was not permitted; they sped past with a long hiss of

tires on the pavement, receded, and returned. Voices, distant calls, silence again, a clatter of horse hoofs, the squeal of streetcars rounding a curve, vague murmurs—then once more the quiet

breathing of the night.

“Bernard?”

“Yes?”

“Not too tired?”

“No.”

At that moment he knew what his mother was thinking, and that she loved him. But he knew, too, that to love someone means relatively little; or, rather, that love is never strong enough to nd the words betting it. Thus he and his mother would always love each other silently. And one day she—or he—would die, without ever, all their lives long, having gone farther than this by way of making their aection known. Thus, too, he had lived at Tarrou’s side, and Tarrou had died this evening without their friendship’s having had time to enter fully into the life of either. Tarrou had “lost the match,” as he put it. But what had he, Rieux, won? No more than the experience of having known plague and remembering it, of having known friendship and remembering it, of knowing aection and being destined one day to remember it. So all a man could win in the conict between plague and life was knowledge and memories. But Tarrou, perhaps, would have called that winning the match.

Another car passed, and Mme. Rieux stirred slightly. Rieux smiled toward her. She assured him she wasn’t tired and immediately added: “You must go and have a good long rest in the mountains,

over there.”

“Yes, Mother.”

Certainly he’d take a rest “over there.” It, too, would be a pretext for memory. But if that was what it meant, winning the match— how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut o from what one hopes for! It was thus, most probably, that Tarrou had lived, and he realized the bleak sterility of a life without illusions. There can be no peace without hope, and Tarrou, denying as he did the right to condemn anyone whomsoever

—though he knew well that no one can help condemning and it befalls even the victim sometimes to turn executioner—Tarrou had lived a life riddled with contradictions and had never known hope’s solace. Did that explain his aspiration toward saintliness, his quest of peace by service in the cause of others? Actually Rieux had no idea of the answer to that question, and it mattered little. The only picture of Tarrou he would always have would be the picture of a man who rmly gripped the steering-wheel of his car when driving, or else the picture of that stalwart body, now lying motionless.

Knowing meant that: a living warmth, and a picture of death.

That, no doubt, explains Dr. Rieux’s composure on receiving next morning the news of his wife’s death. He was in the surgery. His mother came in, almost running, and handed him a telegram; then went back to the hall to give the telegraph-boy a tip. When she returned, her son was holding the telegram open in his hand. She looked at him, but his eyes were resolutely xed on the window; it was ooded with the eulgence of the morning sun rising above the

harbor.

“Bernard,” she said gently.

The doctor turned and looked at her almost as if she were a

stranger.

“The telegram?”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s it. A week ago.”

Mme. Rieux turned her face toward the window. Rieux kept silent for a while. Then he told his mother not to cry, he’d been expecting it, but it was hard all the same. And he knew, in saying this, that this suering was nothing new. For many months, and for the last two days, it was the selfsame suering going on and on.