Plague - Mar 19

As a result of the fighting at the gates, in the course of which the police had had to use their revolvers, ________(一种无法无天的情绪开始滋长).

Some had certainly been wounded in these ________(小冲突/小争论/小摩擦) with the police, but in the town, where, owing to the combined influences of heat and terror, everything was exaggerated, there was talk of deaths.

________(城里开始实行巡逻制度) and often in the empty, sweltering streets, heralded by a clatter of horse hoofs on the cobbles, ________(一分队的骑警) would make its way between the parallel lines of close-shut windows.

Now and again a gunshot was heard; the special brigade recently ________(派遣/指示) to destroy cats and dogs, as possible carriers of infection, was at work. And these whipcrack sounds startling the silence increased the nervous tension already existing in the town.

It was plain to see that ________(春天已经逝去), lavished its ardor on the myriads of flowers that were bursting everywhere into bloom, and now was being crushed out by the twofold onslaught of heat and plague.

Now they ________(给人以空洞的印象) in the silence of the closed town, they had lost the golden spell of happier summers. Plague had killed all colors, vetoed pleasure.

The town was open to the sea and its young folk made free of the beaches. But this summer, for all its nearness, the sea was ________(禁止进入); young limbs had no longer the ________(自由出入的权力/随意使用的权力) of its delights.

“The newspapers and the authorities are ________(与...合作) the plague. They fancy they’re ________(打败) it because a hundred and thirty is a smaller figure than nine hundred and ten.”

But under the prolonged strain it seemed that ________(心肠变硬了); people lived beside those groans or walked past them as though they had become the normal speech of men.