Tarrou’s eyes came back to the doctor, who, bending again, gave him a look of affectionate encouragement.
Tarrou tried to shape a smile, but it could not force its way through the set jaws and lips welded by dry saliva.
In the rigid face only the eyes lived still, glowing with courage.
At seven Mme. Rieux returned to the bedroom.
The doctor went to the surgery to ring up the hospital and arrange for a substitute.
He also decided to postpone his consultations; then lay down for some moments on the surgery couch. Five minutes later he went back to the bedroom.
Tarrou’s face was turned toward Mme.
Rieux, who was sitting close beside the bed, her hands folded on her lap; in the dim light of the room she seemed no more than a darker patch of shadow.
Tarrou was gazing at her so intently that, putting a finger to her lips, Mme. Rieux rose and switched off the bedside lamp.
Behind the curtains the light was growing, and presently, when the sick man’s face grew visible, Mme. Rieux could see his eyes still intent on her.
Bending above the bed, she smoothed out the bolster and, as she straightened up, laid her hand for a moment on his moist, tangled hair.
Then she heard a muffled voice, which seemed to come from very far away, murmur: “Thank you,” and that all was well now.
By the time she was back in her chair Tarrou had shut his eyes, and, despite the sealed mouth, a faint smile seemed to hover on the wasted face.
At noon the fever reached its climax.
A visceral cough racked the sick man’s body and he now was spitting blood.
The ganglia had ceased swelling, but they were still there, like lumps of iron embedded in the joints. Rieux decided that lancing them was impracticable.
Now and then, in the intervals between bouts of fever and coughing fits, Tarrou still gazed at his friends.
But soon his eyes opened less and less often and the glow that shone out from the ravaged face in the brief moments of recognition grew steadily fainter.
The storm, lashing his body into convulsive movement, lit it up with ever rarer flashes, and in the heart of the tempest he was slowly drifting, derelict.
And now Rieux had before him only a masklike face, inert, from which the smile had gone forever.
This human form, his friend’s, lacerated by the spear-thrusts of the plague, consumed by searing, superhuman fires, buffeted by all the raging winds of heaven, was foundering under his eyes in the dark flood of the pestilence, and he could do nothing to avert the wreck.
He could only stand, unavailing, on the shore, empty-handed and sick at heart, unarmed and helpless yet again under the onset of calamity.
And thus, when the end came, the tears that blinded Rieux’s eyes were tears of impotence; and he did not see Tarrou roll over, face to the wall, and die with a short, hollow groan as if somewhere within him an essential chord had snapped.
The next night was not one of struggle but of silence.
In the tranquil death-chamber, beside the dead body now in everyday clothing—here, too, Rieux felt it brooding, that elemental peace which, when he was sitting many nights before on the terrace high above the plague, had followed the brief foray at the gates.
Then, already, it had brought to his mind the silence brooding over the beds in which he had let men die.
There as here it was the same solemn pause, the lull that follows battle; it was the silence of defeat.
But the silence now enveloping his dead friend, so dense, so much akin to the nocturnal silence of the streets and of the town set free at last, made Rieux cruelly aware that this defeat was final, the last disastrous battle that ends a war and makes peace itself an ill beyond all remedy.
The doctor could not tell if Tarrou had found peace, now that all was over, but for himself he had a feeling that no peace was possible to him henceforth, any more than there can be an armistice for a mother bereaved of her son or for a man who buries his friend.
The night was cold again, with frosty stars sparkling in a clear, wintry sky.
And in the dimly lit room they felt the cold pressing itself to the windowpanes and heard the long, silvery suspiration of a polar night.
Mme. Rieux sat near the bed in her usual attitude, her right side lit up by the bedside lamp.
In the center of the room, outside the little zone of light, Rieux sat, waiting.
Now and then thoughts of his wife waylaid him, but he brushed them aside each time.
When the night began, the heels of passers-by had rung briskly in the frozen air.
“Have you attended to everything?” Mme. Rieux had asked.
“Yes, I’ve telephoned.”
Then they had resumed their silent vigil.
From time to time Mme. Rieux stole a glance at her son, and whenever he caught her doing this, he smiled.
Out in the street the usual night-time sounds bridged the long silences.
A good many cars were on the road again, though officially this was not permitted; they sped past with a long hiss of tires on the pavement, receded, and returned.
Voices, distant calls, silence again, a clatter of horse hoofs, the squeal of streetcars rounding a curve, vague murmurs—then once more the quiet breathing of the night.
“Bernard?”
“Yes?”
“Not too tired?”
“No.”
At that moment he knew what his mother was thinking, and that she loved him.
But he knew, too, that to love someone means relatively little; or, rather, that love is never strong enough to find the words befitting it.
Thus he and his mother would always love each other silently.
And one day she—or he—would die, without ever, all their lives long, having gone farther than this by way of making their affection known.