On the day when he came to tell Rieux that the anti-plague serum was ready, and they decided to try it for the first time on M. Othon’s small son, whose case seemed all but hopeless, Rieux suddenly noticed, while he was announcing the latest statistics, that Castel was slumped in his chair, sound asleep.
The difference in his old friend’s face shocked him. The smile of benevolent irony that always played on it had seemed to endow it with perpetual youth; now, abruptly left out of control, with a trickle of saliva between the slightly parted lips, it betrayed its age and the wastage of the years. And, seeing this, Rieux felt a lump come to his throat.
It was by such lapses that Rieux could gauge his exhaustion.
His sensibility was getting out of hand.
Kept under all the time, it had grown hard and brittle and seemed to snap completely now and then, leaving him the prey of his emotions.
No resource was left him but to tighten the stranglehold on his feelings and harden his heart protectively.
For he knew this was the only way of carrying on.
In any case, he had few illusions left, and fatigue was robbing him of even these remaining few.
He knew that, over a period whose end he could not glimpse, his task was no longer to cure but to diagnose.
To detect, to see, to describe, to register, and then condemn—that was his present function.
Sometimes a woman would clutch his sleeve, crying shrilly:
“Doctor, you’ll save him, won’t you?”
But he wasn’t there for saving life; he was there to order a sick man’s evacuation.
How futile was the hatred he saw on faces then!
“You haven’t a heart!” a woman told him on one occasion.
She was wrong; he had one.
It saw him through his twenty-hour day, when he hourly watched men dying who were meant to live. It enabled him to start anew each morning.
He had just enough heart for that, as things were now.
How could that heart have sufficed for saving life?
No, it wasn’t medical aid that he dispensed in those crowded days—only information.
Obviously that could hardly be reckoned a man’s job.
Yet, when all was said and done, who, in that terror-stricken, decimated populace, had scope for any activity worthy of his manhood?
Indeed, for Rieux his exhaustion was a blessing in disguise.
Had he been less tired, his senses more alert, that all-pervading odor of death might have made him sentimental.
But when a man has had only four hours’ sleep, he isn’t sentimental.
He sees things as they are; that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice—hideous, witless justice.
And those others, the men and women under sentence to death, shared his bleak enlightenment.
Before the plague he was welcomed as a savior.
He was going to make them right with a couple of pills or an injection, and people took him by the arm on his way to the sickroom.
Flattering, but dangerous.
Now, on the contrary, he came accompanied by soldiers, and they had to hammer on the door with rifle-butts before the family would open it.
They would have liked to drag him, drag the whole human race, with them to the grave.
Yes, it was quite true that men can’t do without their fellow men; that he was as helpless as these unhappy people and he, too, deserved the same faint thrill of pity that he allowed himself once he had left them.
Such, anyhow, were the thoughts that in those endless-seeming weeks ran in the doctor’s mind, along with thoughts about his severance from his wife.
And such, too, were his friends’ thoughts, judging by the look he saw on their faces.
But the most dangerous effect of the exhaustion steadily gaining on all engaged in the fight against the epidemic did not consist in their relative indifference to outside events and the feelings of others, but in the slackness and supineness that they allowed to invade their personal lives.
They developed a tendency to shirk every movement that didn’t seem absolutely necessary or called for efforts that seemed too great to be worth while.
Thus these men were led to break, oftener and oftener, the rules of hygiene they themselves had instituted, to omit some of the numerous disinfections they should have practiced, and sometimes to visit the homes of people suffering from pneumonic plague without taking steps to safeguard themselves against infection, because they had been notified only at the last moment and could not be bothered with returning to a sanitary service station, sometimes a considerable distance away, to have the necessary injections.
There lay the real danger; for the energy they devoted to fighting the disease made them all the more liable to it.
In short, they were gambling on their luck, and luck is not to be coerced.
There was, however, one man in the town who seemed neither exhausted nor discouraged; indeed, the living image of contentment.
It was Cottard.
Though maintaining contact with Rieux and Rambert, he still kept rather aloof, whereas he deliberately cultivated Tarrou, seeing him as often as Tarrou’s scanty leisure permitted. He had two reasons for this: one, that Tarrou knew all about his case, and the other, that he always gave him a cordial welcome and made him feel at ease.
That was one of the remarkable things about Tarrou; no matter how much work he had put in, he was always a ready listener and an agreeable companion.
Even when, some evenings, he seemed completely worn out, the next day brought him a new lease of energy.
“Tarrou’s a fellow one can talk to,” Cottard once told Rambert, “because he’s really human.
He always understands.”
This may explain why the entries in Tarrou’s diary of this period tend to converge on Cottard’s personality.
It is obvious that Tarrou was attempting to give a full-length picture of the man and noted all his reactions and reflections, whether as conveyed to him by Cottard or interpreted by himself.
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