“Why not?”
Cottard then inquired if it ever happened that a person in a hospital or a nursing home was arrested.
Rieux said it had been known to happen, but all depended on the invalid’s condition.
“You know, Doctor,” Cottard said, “I’ve confidence in you.”
Then he asked the doctor if he’d be kind enough to give him a lift, as he was going into town.
In the center of the town the streets were already growing less crowded and the lights fewer.
Children were playing in front of the doorways.
At Cottard’s request the doctor stopped his car beside one of the groups of children.
They were playing hopscotch and making a great deal of noise.
One of them, a boy with sleek, neatly parted hair and a grubby face, stared hard at Rieux with bright, bold eyes.
The doctor looked away.
Standing on the sidewalk Cottard shook his head.
He then said in a hoarse, rather labored voice, casting uneasy glances over his shoulder:
“Everybody’s talking about an epidemic.
Is there anything in it, Doctor?”
“People always talk,” Rieux replied. “That’s only to be expected.”
“You’re right.
And if we have ten deaths they’ll think it’s the end of the world.
But it’s not that we need here.”
The engine was ticking over.
Rieux had his hand on the clutch.
But he was looking again at the boy who was still watching him with an oddly grave intentness.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, the child smiled, showing all his teeth.
“Yes? And what do we need here?” Rieux asked, returning the child’s smile.
Abruptly Cottard gripped the door of the car and, as he turned to go, almost shouted in a rageful, passionate voice:
“An earthquake!
A big one!”
There was no earthquake, and the whole of the following day was spent, so far as Rieux was concerned, in long drives to every corner of the town, in parleyings with the families of the sick and arguments with the invalids themselves.
Never had Rieux known his profession to weigh on him so heavily.
Hitherto his patients had helped to lighten his task; they gladly put themselves into his hands.
For the first time the doctor felt they were keeping aloof, wrapping themselves up in their malady with a sort of bemused hostility.
It was a struggle to which he wasn’t yet accustomed.
And when, at ten that evening, he parked his car outside the home of his old asthma patient—his last visit of the day—it was an effort for Rieux to drag himself from his seat.
For some moments he lingered, gazing up the dark street, watching the stars appear and disappear in the blackness of the sky.
When Rieux entered the room, the old man was sitting up in bed, at his usual occupation, counting out dried peas from one pan to another.
On seeing his visitor, he looked up, beaming with delight.
“Well, Doctor? It’s cholera, isn’t it?”
“Where on earth did you get that idea from?”
“It’s in the paper, and the radio said it, too.”
“No, it’s not cholera.”
“Anyhow,” the old man chuckled excitedly, “the big bugs are laying it on thick. Got the jitters, haven’t they?”
“Don’t you believe a word of it,” the doctor said.
He had examined the old man and now was sitting in the middle of the dingy little dining-room.
Yes, despite what he had said, he was afraid.
He knew that in this suburb alone eight or ten unhappy people, cowering over their buboes, would be awaiting his visit next morning.
In only two or three cases had incision of the buboes caused any improvement.
For most of them it would mean going to the hospital, and he knew how poor people feel about hospitals.
“I don’t want them trying their experiments on him,” had said the wife of one of his patients.
But he wouldn’t be experimented on; he would die, that was all.
That the regulations now in force were inadequate was lamentably clear.