The sick man was gazing at him steadily, and though his face was drawn, the gray eyes were calm.
Rieux smiled down on him.
“Now try to sleep.
I’ll be back soon.”
As he was going out he heard Tarrou calling, and turned back.
Tarrou’s manner had an odd effect, as though he were at once trying to keep back what he had to say and forcing himself to say it.
“Rieux,” he said at last, “you must tell me the whole truth. I count on that.”
“I promise it.”
Tarrou’s heavy face relaxed in a brief smile.
“Thanks.
I don’t want to die, and I shall put up a fight.
But if I lose the match, I want to make a good end of it.”
Bending forward, Rieux pressed his shoulder.
“No. To become a saint, you need to live.
So fight away!”
In the course of that day the weather, which after being very cold had grown slightly milder, broke in a series of violent hailstorms followed by rain.
At sunset the sky cleared a little, and it was bitterly cold again.
Rieux came home in the evening.
His overcoat still on, he entered his friend’s bedroom.
Tarrou did not seem to have moved, but his set lips, drained white by fever, told of the effort he was keeping up.
“Well?” Rieux asked.
Tarrou raised his broad shoulders a little out of the bedclothes.
“Well,” he said, “I’m losing the match.”
The doctor bent over him.
Ganglia had formed under the burning skin and there was a rumbling in his chest, like the sound of a hidden forge.
The strange thing was that Tarrou showed symptoms of both varieties of plague at once.
Rieux straightened up and said the serum hadn’t yet had time to take effect.
An uprush of fever in his throat drowned the few words that Tarrou tried to utter.
After dinner Rieux and his mother took up their posts at the sick man’s bedside.
The night began with a struggle, and Rieux knew that this grim wrestling with the angel of plague was to last until dawn.
In this struggle Tarrou’s robust shoulders and chest were not his greatest assets; rather, the blood that had spurted under Rieux’s needle and, in this blood, that something more vital than the soul, which no human skill can bring to light.
The doctor’s task could be only to watch his friend’s struggle.
As to what he was about to do, the stimulants to inject, the abscesses to stimulate—many months’ repeated failures had taught him to appreciate such expedients at their true value.
Indeed, the only way in which he might help was to provide opportunities for the beneficence of chance, which too often stays dormant unless roused to action.
Luck was an ally he could not dispense with.
For Rieux was confronted by an aspect of the plague that baffled him.
Yet again it was doing all it could to confound the tactics used against it; it launched attacks in unexpected places and retreated from those where it seemed definitely lodged.
Once more it was out to darken counsel.
Tarrou struggled without moving.
Not once in the course of the night did he counter the enemy’s attacks by restless agitation; only with all his stolid bulk, with silence, did he carry on the fight.
Nor did he even try to speak, thus intimating, after his fashion, that he could no longer let his attention stray.
Rieux could follow the vicissitudes of the struggle only in his friend’s eyes, now open and now shut; in the eyelids, now more closely welded to the eyeball, now distended; and in his gaze fixed on some object in the room or brought back to the doctor and his mother.
And each time it met the doctor’s gaze, with a great effort Tarrou smiled.
At one moment there came a sound of hurrying footsteps in the street.
They were in flight before a distant throbbing which gradually approached until the street was loud with the clamor of the downpour; another rain-squall was sweeping the town, mingled presently with hailstones that clattered on the sidewalk.
Window awnings were flapping wildly.
Rieux, whose attention had been diverted momentarily by the noises of the squall, looked again across the shadows at Tarrou’s face, on which fell the light of a small bedside lamp.
His mother was knitting, raising her eyes now and then from her work to gaze at the sick man.
The doctor had done everything that could be done.
When the squall had passed, the silence in the room grew denser, filled only by the silent turmoil of the unseen battle.