“There wasn’t any remission this morning, was there, Rieux?”
Rieux shook his head, adding, however, that the child was putting up more resistance than one would have expected.
Paneloux, who was slumped against the wall, said in a low voice:
“So if he is to die, he will have suffered longer.”
Light was increasing in the ward.
The occupants of the other nine beds were tossing about and groaning, but in tones that seemed deliberately subdued.
Only one, at the far end of the ward, was screaming, or rather uttering little exclamations at regular intervals, which seemed to convey surprise more than pain.
Indeed, one had the impression that even for the sufferers the frantic terror of the early phase had passed, and there was a sort of mournful resignation in their present attitude toward the disease.
Only the child went on fighting with all his little might.
Now and then Rieux took his pulse—less because this served any purpose than as an escape from his utter helplessness—and when he closed his eyes, he seemed to feel its tumult mingling with the fever of his own blood.
And then, at one with the tortured child, he struggled to sustain him with all the remaining strength of his own body.
But, linked for a few moments, the rhythms of their heartbeats soon fell apart, the child escaped him, and again he knew his impotence.
Then he released the small, thin wrist and moved back to his place.
The light on the whitewashed walls was changing from pink to yellow.
The first waves of another day of heat were beating on the windows.
They hardly heard Grand saying he would come back as he turned to go.
All were waiting.
The child, his eyes still closed, seemed to grow a little calmer.
His clawlike fingers were feebly plucking at the sides of the bed.
Then they rose, scratched at the blanket over his knees, and suddenly he doubled up his limbs, bringing his thighs above his stomach, and remained quite still.
For the first time he opened his eyes and gazed at Rieux, who was standing immediately in front of him.
In the small face, rigid as a mask of grayish clay, slowly the lips parted and from them rose a long, incessant scream, hardly varying with his respiration, and filling the ward with a fierce, indignant protest, so little childish that it seemed like a collective voice issuing from all the sufferers there.
Rieux clenched his jaws, Tarrou looked away.
Rambert went and stood beside Castel, who closed the book lying on his knees.
Paneloux gazed down at the small mouth, fouled with the sordes of the plague and pouring out the angry death-cry that has sounded through the ages of mankind.
He sank on his knees, and all present found it natural to hear him say in a voice hoarse but clearly audible across that nameless, never ending wail:
“My God, spare this child!”
But the wail continued without cease and the other sufferers began to grow restless.
The patient at the far end of the ward, whose little broken cries had gone on without a break, now quickened their tempo so that they flowed together in one unbroken cry, while the others’ groans grew louder.
A gust of sobs swept through the room, drowning Paneloux’s prayer, and Rieux, who was still tightly gripping the rail of the bed, shut his eyes, dazed with exhaustion and disgust.
When he opened them again, Tarrou was at his side.
“I must go,” Rieux said. “I can’t bear to hear them any longer.”
But then, suddenly, the other sufferers fell silent.
And now the doctor grew aware that the child’s wail, after weakening more and more, had fluttered out into silence.
Around him the groans began again, but more faintly, like a far echo of the fight that now was over.
For it was over.
Castel had moved round to the other side of the bed and said the end had come.
His mouth still gaping, but silent now, the child was lying among the tumbled blankets, a small, shrunken form, with the tears still wet on his cheeks.
Paneloux went up to the bed and made the sign of benediction.
Then gathering up his cassock, he walked out by the passage between the beds.
“Will you have to start it all over again?” Tarrou asked Castel.
The old doctor nodded slowly, with a twisted smile. “Perhaps. After all, he put up a surprisingly long resistance.”
Rieux was already on his way out, walking so quickly and with such a strange look on his face that Paneloux put out an arm to check him when he was about to pass him in the doorway.
“Come, Doctor,” he began.
Rieux swung round on him fiercely.
“Ah! That child, anyhow, was innocent, and you know it as well as I do!”
He strode on, brushing past Paneloux, and walked across the school playground.
Sitting on a wooden bench under the dingy, stunted trees, he wiped off the sweat that was beginning to run into his eyes.
He felt like shouting imprecations—anything to loosen the stranglehold lashing his heart with steel.
Heat was flooding down between the branches of the fig trees.