He sank back on the cushion. “That’s how it is,” he added wearily, “and there’s nothing to be done about it. So let’s recognize the fact and draw the conclusions.”
“What conclusions?”
“Ah,” Rieux said, “a man can’t cure and know at the same time. So let’s cure as quickly as we can. That’s the more urgent job.”
At midnight Tarrou and Rieux were giving Rambert the map of the district he was to keep under surveillance. Tarrou glanced at his watch. Looking up, he met Rambert’s gaze.
“Have you let them know?” he asked. The journalist looked away.
“I’d sent them a note”, he spoke with an effort, “before coming to see you.” Toward the close of October Castel’s anti-plague serum was tried for the first
time. Practically speaking, it was Rieux’s last card. If it failed, the doctor was convinced the whole town would be at the mercy of the epidemic, which would either continue its ravages for an unpredictable period or perhaps die out abruptly of its own accord.
The day before Castel called on Rieux, M. Othon’s son had fallen ill and all the family had to go into quarantine. Thus the mother, who had only recently come out of it, found herself isolated once again. In deference to the official regulations the magistrate had promptly sent for Dr. Rieux the moment he saw symptoms of the disease in his little boy. Mother and father were standing at the bedside when Rieux entered the room. The boy was in the phase of extreme prostration and submitted without a whimper to the doctor’s examination. When Rieux raised his eyes he saw the magistrate’s gaze intent on him, and, behind, the mother’s pale face. She was holding a handkerchief to her mouth, and her big, dilated eyes followed each of the doctor’s movements.
“He has it, I suppose?” the magistrate asked in a toneless voice. “Yes.” Rieux gazed down at the child again.
The mother’s eyes widened yet more, but she still said nothing. M. Othon, too, kept silent for a while before saying in an even lower tone:
“Well, doctor, we must do as we are told to do.”
Rieux avoided looking at Mme Othon, who was still holding her handkerchief to her mouth.
“It needn’t take long,” he said rather awkwardly, “if you’ll let me use your phone.” The magistrate said he would take him to the telephone. But before going, the
doctor turned toward Mme Othon.
“I regret very much indeed, but I’m afraid you’ll have to get your things ready. You know how it is.”
Mme Othon seemed disconcerted. She was staring at the floor.
Then, “I understand,” she murmured, slowly nodding her head. “I’ll set about it at once.”
Before leaving, Rieux on a sudden impulse asked the Othons if there wasn’t anything they’d like him to do for them. The mother gazed at him in silence. And now the magistrate averted his eyes.
“No,” he said, then swallowed hard. “But, save my son.”
In the early days a mere formality, quarantine had now been reorganized by Rieux and Rambert on very strict lines.
In particular they insisted on having members of the family of a patient kept apart. If, unawares, one of them had been infected, the risks of an extension of the infection must not be multiplied. Rieux explained this to the magistrate, who signified his approval of the procedure. Nevertheless, he and his wife exchanged a glance that made it clear to Rieux how keenly they both felt the separation thus imposed on them. Mme Othon and her little girl could be given rooms in the quarantine hospital under Rambert’s charge. For the magistrate, however, no accommodation was available except in an isolation camp the authorities were now installing in the municipal stadium, using tents supplied by the highway department. When Rieux apologized for the poor accommodation, M.
Othon replied that there was one rule for all alike, and it was only proper to abide by it.
The boy was taken to the auxiliary hospital and put in a ward of ten beds which had formerly been a classroom. After some twenty hours Rieux became convinced that the case was hopeless. The infection was steadily spreading, and the boy’s body putting up no resistance. Tiny, half-formed, but acutely painful buboes were clogging the joints of the child’s puny limbs. Obviously it was a losing fight.
Under the circumstances Rieux had no qualms about testing Castel’s serum on the boy. That night, after dinner, they performed the inoculation, a lengthy process, without getting the slightest reaction. At daybreak on the following day they gathered round the bed to observe the effects of this test inoculation on which so much hung.
The child had come out of his extreme prostration and was tossing about convulsively on the bed. From four in the morning Dr. Castel and Tarrou had been keeping watch and noting, stage by stage, the progress and remissions of the malady. Tarrou’s bulky form was slightly drooping at the head of the bed, while at its foot, with Rieux standing beside him, Castel was seated, reading, with every appearance of calm, an old leather-bound book. One by one, as the light increased in the former classroom, the others arrived. Paneloux, the first to come, leaned against the wall on the opposite side of the bed to Tarrou.
His face was drawn with grief, and the accumulated weariness of many weeks, during which he had never spared himself, had deeply seamed his somewhat prominent forehead. Grand came next. It was seven o’clock, and he apologized for being out of breath; he could only stay a moment, but wanted to know if any definite results had been observed. Without speaking, Rieux pointed to the child. His eyes shut, his teeth clenched, his features frozen in an agonized grimace, he was rolling his head from side to side on the bolster. When there was just light enough to make out the half-obliterated figures of an equation chalked on a blackboard that still hung on the wall at the far end of the room, Rambert entered. Posting himself at the foot of the next bed, he took a package of cigarettes from his pocket. But after his first glance at the child’s face he put it back.
From his chair Castel looked at Rieux over his spectacles. “Any news of his father?”
“No,” said Rieux. “He’s in the isolation camp.”
The doctor’s hands were gripping the rail of the bed, his eyes fixed on the small tortured body. Suddenly it stiffened, and seemed to give a little at the waist, as slowly the arms and legs spread out X-wise. From the body, naked under an army blanket, rose a smell of damp wool and stale sweat. The boy had gritted his teeth again. Then very gradually he relaxed, bringing his arms and legs back toward the center of the bed, still without speaking or opening his eyes, and his breathing seemed to quicken. Rieux looked at Tarrou, who hastily lowered his eyes.
They had already seen children die, for many months now death had shown no favoritism, but they had never yet watched a child’s agony minute by minute, as they had now been doing since daybreak. Needless to say, the pain inflicted on these innocent victims had always seemed to them to be what in fact it was: an abominable thing. But hitherto they had felt its abomination in, so to speak, an abstract way; they had never had to witness over so long a period the death-throes of an innocent child.
And just then the boy had a sudden spasm, as if something had bitten him in the stomach, and uttered a long, shrill wail. For moments that seemed endless he stayed in a queer, contorted position, his body racked by convulsive tremors; it was as if his frail frame were bending before the fierce breath of the plague, breaking under the reiterated gusts of fever. Then the storm-wind passed, there came a lull, and he relaxed a little; the fever seemed to recede, leaving him gasping for breath on a dank, pestilential shore, lost in a languor that already looked like death.
When for the third time the fiery wave broke on him, lifting him a little, the child curled himself up and shrank away to the edge of the bed, as if in terror of the flames advancing on him, licking his limbs. A moment later, after tossing his head wildly to and fro, he flung off the blanket. From between the inflamed eyelids big tears welled up and trickled down the sunken, leaden-hued cheeks. When the spasm had passed, utterly exhausted, tensing his thin legs and arms, on which, within forty-eight hours, the flesh had wasted to the bone, the child lay flat, racked on the tumbled bed, in a grotesque parody of crucifixion.
Bending, Tarrou gently stroked with his big paw the small face stained with tears and sweat. Castel had closed his book a few moments before, and his eyes were now fixed on the child. He began to speak, but had to give a cough before continuing, because his voice rang out so harshly.
“There wasn’t any remission this morning, was there, Rieux?”
Rieux shook his head, adding, however, that the child was putting up more resistance than one would have expected. Paneloux, who was slumped against the wall, said in a low voice:
“So if he is to die, he will have suffered longer.” Light was increasing in the ward. The occupants of the other nine beds were tossing about and groaning, but in tones
