“Read it,” Grand whispered.
And Rieux read:
“One fine morning in May, a slim young horsewoman might have been seen riding a glossy sorrel mare along the avenues of the Bois, among the flowers …”
“Is that it?” There was a feverish quaver in the old voice.
Rieux refrained from looking at him, and he began to toss about in the bed. “Yes, I know. I know what you’re thinking.
‘Fine’ isn’t the word. It’s—”
Rieux clasped his hand under the coverlet.
“No, Doctor.
It’s too late—no time …” His breast heaved painfully, then suddenly he said in a loud, shrill voice:
“Burn it!”
The doctor hesitated, but Grand repeated his injunction in so violent a tone and with such agony in his voice that Rieux walked across to the fireplace and dropped the sheets on the dying fire.
It blazed up, and there was a sudden flood of light, a fleeting warmth, in the room.
When the doctor came back to the bed, Grand had his back turned, his face almost touching the wall.
After injecting the serum Rieux whispered to his friend that Grand wouldn’t last the night, and Tarrou volunteered to stay with him.
The doctor approved.
All night Rieux was haunted by the idea of Grand’s death.
But next morning he found his patient sitting up in bed, talking to Tarrou.
His temperature was down to normal and there were no symptoms other than a generalized prostration.
“Yes, Doctor,” Grand said. “I was overhasty.
But I’ll make another start.
You’ll see, I can remember every word.”
Rieux looked at Tarrou dubiously. “We must wait,” he said.
But at noon there was no change.
By nightfall Grand could be considered out of danger.
Rieux was completely baffled by this “resurrection.” Other surprises were in store for him.
About the same time there was brought to the hospital a girl whose case Rieux diagnosed as hopeless, and he had her sent immediately to the isolation ward.
She was delirious and had all the symptoms of pneumonic plague.
Next morning, however, the temperature had fallen.
As in Grand’s case the doctor assumed this was the ordinary morning fall that his experience had taught him to regard as a bad sign.
But at noon her temperature still showed no rise and at night it went up only a few degrees. Next morning it was down to normal.
Though very exhausted, the girl was breathing freely.
Rieux remarked to Tarrou that her recovery was “against all the rules!”
But in the course of the next week four similar cases came to his notice.
The old asthma patient was bubbling over with excitement when Rieux and Tarrou visited him at the end of the week.
“Would you ever have believed it! They’re coming out again,” he said.
“Who?”
“Why, the rats!”
Not one dead or living rat had been seen in the town since April.
“Does that mean it’s starting all over again?” Tarrou asked Rieux.
The old man was rubbing his hands.
“You should see ’em running, Doctor!
It’s a treat, it is!”
He himself had seen two rats slipping into the house by the street door, and some neighbors, too, had told him they’d seen rats in their basements.
In some houses people had heard those once familiar scratchings and rustlings behind the woodwork.
Rieux awaited with much interest the mortality figures that were announced every Monday.
They showed a decrease.
PART FIVE
Though this sudden setback of the plague was as welcome as it was unlooked-for, our townsfolk were in no hurry to jubilate.
While intensifying their desire to be set free, the terrible months they had lived through had taught them prudence, and they had come to count less and less on a speedy end of the epidemic.
All the same, this new development was the talk of the town, and people began to nurse hopes none the less heartfelt for being unavowed.