In those fever-hot, nerve-ridden sickrooms crazy scenes took place.
But the issue was always the same. The patient was removed.
Then Rieux, too, could leave.
In the early days he had merely telephoned, then rushed off to see other patients, without waiting for the ambulance.
But no sooner was he gone than the family locked and barred their doors, preferring contact with the plague to a parting whose issue they now knew only too well.
There followed objurgations, screams, batterings on the door, action by the police, and later armed force; the patient was taken by storm.
Thus during the first few weeks Rieux was compelled to stay with the patient till the ambulance came.
Later, when each doctor was accompanied by a volunteer police officer, Rieux could hurry away to the next patient.
But, to begin with, every evening was like that evening when he was called in for Mme. Loret’s daughter. He was shown into a small apartment decorated with fans and artificial flowers. The mother greeted him with a faltering smile.
“Oh, I do hope it’s not the fever everyone’s talking about.”
Lifting the coverlet and chemise, he gazed in silence at the red blotches on the girl’s thighs and stomach, the swollen ganglia.
After one glance the mother broke into shrill, uncontrollable cries of grief.
And every evening mothers wailed thus, with a distraught abstraction, as their eyes fell on those fatal stigmata on limbs and bellies; every evening hands gripped Rieux’s arms, there was a rush of useless words, promises, and tears; every evening the nearing tocsin of the ambulance provoked scenes as vain as every form of grief.
Rieux had nothing to look forward to but a long sequence of such scenes, renewed again and again.
Yes, plague, like abstraction, was monotonous; perhaps only one factor changed, and that was Rieux himself.
Standing at the foot of the statue of the Republic that evening, he felt it; all he was conscious of was a bleak indifference steadily gaining on him as he gazed at the door of the hotel Rambert had just entered.
After these wearing weeks, after all those nightfalls when the townsfolk poured into the streets to roam them aimlessly, Rieux had learned that he need no longer steel himself against pity.
One grows out of pity when it’s useless. And in this feeling that his heart had slowly closed in on itself, the doctor found a solace, his only solace, for the almost unendurable burden of his days.
This, he knew, would make his task easier, and therefore he was glad of it.
When he came home at two in the morning and his mother was shocked at the blank look he gave her, she was deploring precisely the sole alleviation Rieux could then experience.
To fight abstraction you must have something of it in your own make-up.
But how could Rambert be expected to grasp that?
Abstraction for him was all that stood in the way of his happiness.
Indeed, Rieux had to admit the journalist was right, in one sense.
But he knew, too, that abstraction sometimes proves itself stronger than happiness; and then, if only then, it has to be taken into account.
And this was what was going to happen to Rambert, as the doctor was to learn when, much later, Rambert told him more about himself.
Thus he was enabled to follow, and on a different plane, the dreary struggle in progress between each man’s happiness and the abstractions of the plague—which constituted the whole life of our town over a long period of time.
But where some saw abstraction others saw the truth.
The first month of the plague ended gloomily, with a violent recrudescence of the epidemic and a dramatic sermon preached by Father Paneloux, the Jesuit priest who had given an arm to old Michel when he was tottering home at the start of his illness.
Father Paneloux had already made his mark with frequent contributions to the Oran Geographical Society; these dealt chiefly with ancient inscriptions, on which he was an authority.
But he had also reached a wider, non-specialist public with a series of lectures on present-day individualism.
In these he had shown himself a stalwart champion of Christian doctrine at its most precise and purest, equally remote from modern laxity and the obscurantism of the past.
On these occasions he had not shrunk from trouncing his hearers with some vigorous home-truths.
Hence his local celebrity.
Toward the end of the month the ecclesiastical authorities in our town resolved to do battle against the plague with the weapons appropriate to them, and organized a Week of Prayer.
These manifestations of public piety were to be concluded on Sunday by a High Mass celebrated under the auspices of St. Roch, the plague-stricken saint, and Father Paneloux was asked to preach the sermon.
For a fortnight he desisted from the research work on St. Augustine and the African Church that had won for him a high place in his Order.
A man of a passionate, fiery temperament, he flung himself wholeheartedly into the task assigned him.
The sermon was a topic of conversation long before it was delivered and, in its way, it marks an important date in the history of the period.
There were large attendances at the services of the Week of Prayer.
It must not, however, be assumed that in normal times the townsfolk of Oran are particularly devout.
On Sunday mornings, for instance, sea-bathing competes seriously with churchgoing.
Nor must it be thought that they had seen a great light and had a sudden change of heart.
But, for one thing, now that the town was closed and the harbor out of bounds, there was no question of bathing; moreover, they were in a quite exceptional frame of mind and, though in their heart of hearts they were far from recognizing the enormity of what had come on them, they couldn’t help feeling, for obvious reasons, that decidedly something had changed.
Nevertheless, many continued hoping that the epidemic would soon die out and they and their families be spared.
Thus they felt under no obligation to make any change in their habits as yet.
Plague was for them an unwelcome visitant, bound to take its leave one day as unexpectedly as it had come.
Alarmed, but far from desperate, they hadn’t yet reached the phase when plague would seem to them the very tissue of their existence; when they forgot the lives that until now it had been given them to lead.
In short, they were waiting for the turn of events.
With regard to religion—as to many other problems—plague had induced in them a curious frame of mind, as remote from indifference as from fervor; the best name to give it, perhaps, might be “objectivity.”