It was Tarrou who had asked Rieux for the interview he refers to in his diary.
On that evening, as it happened, just before Tarrou arrived, the doctor had gazed for some moments at his mother, who was sitting very still in a corner of the dining-room.
Once her household tasks were over, she spent most of her time in that chair.
Her hands folded in her lap, she sat there waiting.
Rieux wasn’t even sure it was for him she waited.
However, something always changed in his mother’s face when he came in.
The silent resignation that a laborious life had given it seemed to light up with a sudden glow.
Then she returned to her tranquillity.
That evening she was gazing out of the window at the now empty street.
The street lighting had been reduced by two thirds, and only at long intervals a lamp cast flickering gleams through the thick darkness of the town.
“Will they keep to the reduced lighting as long as the plague lasts?” Mme. Rieux asked.
“I expect so.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t last till winter.
It would be terribly depressing.”
“Yes,” Rieux said.
He saw his mother’s gaze settle on his forehead.
He knew that the worry and overwork of the last few days had scored their traces there.
“Didn’t things go well today?” his mother asked.
“Oh, much as usual.”
As usual!
That was to say the new consignment of serum sent from Paris seemed less effective than the first, and the death-rate was rising.
It was still impossible to administer prophylactic inoculations elsewhere than in families already attacked; if its use was to be generalized, very large quantities of the vaccine would have been needed.
Most of the buboes refused to burst—it was as if they underwent a seasonal hardening—and the victims suffered horribly.
During the last twenty-four hours there had been two cases of a new form of the epidemic; the plague was becoming pneumonic.
On this very day, in the course of a meeting, the much-harassed doctors had pressed the Prefect—the unfortunate man seemed quite at his wits’ end—to issue new regulations to prevent contagion being carried from mouth to mouth, as happens in pneumonic plague.
The Prefect had done as they wished, but as usual they were groping, more or less, in the dark.
Looking at his mother, he felt an uprush of a half-forgotten emotion, the love of his boyhood, at the sight of her soft brown gaze intent on him.
“Don’t you ever feel alarmed, Mother?”
“Oh, at my age there isn’t much left to fear.”
“The days are very long, and just now I’m hardly ever at home.”
“I don’t mind waiting, if I know you’re going to come back.
And when you aren’t here, I think of what you’re doing.
Have you any news?”
“Yes, if I’m to believe the last telegram, everything’s going as well as could be expected.
But I know she says that to prevent my worrying.”
The doorbell rang.
The doctor gave his mother a smile and went to open the door.
In the dim light on the landing Tarrou looked like a big gray bear.
Rieux gave his visitor a seat facing his desk, while he himself remained standing behind the desk chair.
Between them was the only light in the room, a desk lamp. Tarrou came straight to the point.
“I know,” he said, “that I can talk to you quite frankly.”
Rieux nodded.
“In a fortnight, or a month at most,” Tarrou continued, “you’ll serve no purpose here. Things will have got out of hand.”
“I agree.”
“The sanitary department is inefficient—understaffed, for one thing—and you’re worked off your feet.”
Rieux admitted this was so.
“Well,” Tarrou said, “I’ve heard that the authorities are thinking of a sort of conscription of the population, and all men in good health will be required to help in fighting the plague.”
“Your information was correct.
But the authorities are in none too good odor as it is, and the Prefect can’t make up his mind.”
“If he daren’t risk compulsion, why not call for voluntary help?”