Cottard nodded. “Yes, that’s quite on the cards; in fact everyone will have to make a fresh start.”
They were nearing Cottard’s house. He now seemed more cheerful, determined to take a rosier view of the future. Obviously he was picturing the town entering on a new lease of life, blotting out its past and starting again with a clean sheet.
“So that’s that,” Tarrou smiled. “Quite likely things will pan out all right for you, too, who can say? It’ll be a new life for all of us, in a manner of speaking.”
They were shaking hands at the door of the apartment house where Cottard lived. “Quite right!” Cottard was growing more and more excited. “That would be a
great idea, starting again with a clean sheet.”
Suddenly from the lightless hall two men emerged. Tarrou had hardly time to hear his companion mutter: “Now, what do those birds want?” when the men in question, who looked like subordinate government employees in their best clothes, cut in with an inquiry if his name was Cottard. With a stifled exclamation Cottard swung round and dashed off into the darkness. Taken by surprise, Tarrou and the two men gazed blankly at each other for some moments.
Then Tarrou asked them what they wanted. In noncommittal tones they informed him that they wanted “some information,” and walked away, unhurrying, in the direction Cottard had taken.
On his return home Tarrou wrote out an account of this peculiar incident, following it up with a “Feeling very tired tonight”, which is confirmed by his handwriting in this entry. He added that he had still much to do, but that was no reason for not “holding himself in readiness,” and he questioned if he were ready.
As a sort of postscript, and, in fact, it is here that Tarrou’s diary ends, he noted that there is always a certain hour of the day and of the night when a man’s courage is at its lowest ebb, and it was that hour only that he feared.
When next day, a few days before the date fixed for the opening of the gates, Dr. Rieux came home at noon, he was 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 willpower 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 definite, he told Rieux, but they might well be those of plague.
After examining him Rieux said: “No, there’s nothing definite as yet.”
But Tarrou also suffered 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 effort.
“Well, it’s the first time I’ve known you do the injection without ordering the patient off 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 finally 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 effect, 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 fight. 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 fight 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 effort he 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 effect. 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 beneficence 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 baffled 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 definitely 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 fight. 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
