The plague

  Thus Cottard (if we may trust Tarrou's diagnosis) had good grounds for viewing the symptoms of mental confusion and distress in those around him with an understanding and an indulgent satisfaction that might have found expression in the remark: "Prate away, my friends—but I had it first!"

  "When I suggested to him," Tarrou continues, "that the surest way of not being cut off from others was having a clean conscience, he frowned. 'If that is so, everyone's always cut off from everyone else.' And a moment later he added: 'Say what you like, Tarrou, but let me tell you this: the one way of making people hang together is to give 'em a spell of plague. You've only got to look around you.' Of course I see his point, and I understand how congenial our

  present mode of life must be to him. How could he fail to recognize at every turn reactions that were his; the efforts everyone makes to keep on the right side of other people; the obligingness sometimes shown in helping someone who has lost his way, and the ill humor shown at other times; the way people flock to the luxury restaurants, their pleasure at being there and their reluctance to leave; the crowds lining up daily at the picture-houses, filling theaters and music halls and even dance halls, and flooding boisterously out into the squares and avenues; the shrinking from every contact and, notwithstanding, the craving for human warmth that urges people to one another, body to body, sex to sex? Cottard has been through all that obviously—with one exception; we may rule out women in his case. With that mug of his! And I should say that when tempted to visit a brothel he refrains; it might give him a bad name and be held up against him one day.

  "In short, this epidemic has done him proud. Of a lonely man who hated loneliness it has made an accomplice. Yes, 'accomplice' is the word that fits, and doesn't he relish his complicity! He is happily at one with all around him, with their superstitions, their groundless panics, the susceptibilities of people whose nerves are always on the stretch; with their fixed idea of talking the least possible about plague and nevertheless talking of it all the time; with their abject terror at the slightest headache, now they know headache to be an early symptom of the disease; and, lastly, with their frayed, irritable sensibility that takes offense at trifling oversights and brings tears to their eyes over the loss of a trouser-button."

  Tarrou often went out with Cottard in the evening, and he describes how they would plunge together into the dark crowds filling the streets at nightfall; how they mingled, shoulder to shoulder, in the black-and-white moving mass lit here and there by the fitful gleam of a street-lamp; and how they let themselves be swept along with the human

  herd toward resorts of pleasure whose companionable warmth seemed a safeguard from the plague's cold breath. What Cottard had some months previously been looking for in public places, luxury and the lavish life, the frenzied orgies he had dreamed of without being able to procure them—these were now the quest of a whole populace. Though prices soared inevitably, never had so much money been squandered, and while bare necessities were often lacking, never had so much been spent on superfluities. All the recreations of leisure, due though it now was to unemployment, multiplied a hundredfold. Sometimes Tarrou and Cottard would follow for some minutes one of those amorous couples who in the past would have tried to hide the passion drawing them to each other, but now, pressed closely to each other's side, paraded the streets among the crowd, with the trancelike self-absorption of great lovers, oblivious of the people around them. Cottard watched them gloatingly. "Good work, my dears!" he'd exclaim. "Go to it!" Even his voice had changed, grown louder; as Tarrou wrote, he was "blossoming out" in the congenial atmosphere of mass excitement, fantastically large tips clinking on cafe tables, love-affairs shaping under his eyes.

  However, Tarrou seemed to detect little if any spiteful-ness in Cottard's attitude. His "I've been through the mill myself" had more pity than triumph in it. "I suspect," Tarrou wrote, "that he's getting quite fond of these people shut up under their little patch of sky within their city walls. For instance, he'd like to explain to them, if he had a chance, that it isn't so terrible as all that. 'You hear them saying,' he told me, ' "After the plague I'll do this or that." . . . They're eating their hearts out instead of staying put. And they don't even realize their privileges. Take my case: could I say "After my arrest I'll do this or that"? Arrest's a beginning, not an end. Whereas plague. . . . Do you know what I think? They're fretting simply because they won't let themselves go. And I know what I'm talking about.'"

  "Yes, he knows what he's talking about," Tarrou added. "He has an insight into the anomalies in the lives of the people here who, though they have an instinctive craving for human contacts, can't bring themselves to yield to it, because of the mistrust that keeps them apart. For it's common knowledge that you can't trust your neighbor; he may pass the disease to you without your knowing it, and take advantage of a moment of inadvertence on your part to infect you. When one has spent one's days, as Cottard has, seeing a possible police spy in everyone, even in persons he feels drawn to, it's easy to understand this reaction. One can have fellow-feelings toward people who are haunted by the idea that when they least expect it plague may lay its cold hand on their shoulders, and is, perhaps, about to do so at the very moment when one is congratulating oneself on being safe and sound. So far as this is possible, he is at ease under a reign of terror. But I suspect that, just because he has been through it before them, he can't wholly share with them the agony of this feeling of uncertainty that never leaves them. It comes to this: like all of us who have not yet died of plague he fully realizes that his freedom and his life may be snatched from him at any moment. But since he, personally, has learned what it is to live in a state of constant fear, he finds it normal that others should come to know this state. Or perhaps it should be put like this: fear seems to him more bearable under these conditions than it was when he had to bear its burden alone. In this respect he's wrong, and this makes him harder to understand than other people. Still, after all, that's why he is worth a greater effort to understand."

  Tarrou's notes end with a story illustrating the curious state of mind arrived at no less by Cottard than by other dwellers in the plague-stricken town. The story re-creates as nearly as may be the curiously feverish atmosphere of this period, and that is why the narrator attaches importance to it.

  One evening Cottard and Tarrou went to the Municipal Opera House, where Gluck's Orpheus was being given. Cottard had invited Tarrou. A touring operatic company had come to Oran in the spring for a series of performances. Marooned there by the outbreak of plague and finding themselves in difficulties, the company and the management of the opera house had come to an agreement under which they were to give one performance a week until further notice. Thus for several months our theater had been resounding every Friday evening with the melodious laments of Orpheus and Eurydice's vain appeals. None the less, the opera continued in high favor and played regularly to full houses. From their seats, the most expensive, Cottard and Tarrou could look down at the orchestra seats filled to capacity with the cream of Oran society. It was interesting to see how careful they were, as they went to their places, to make an elegant entrance. While the musicians were discreetly tuning up, men in evening dress could be seen moving from one row to another, bowing gracefully to friends under the flood of light bathing the proscenium. In the soft hum of well-mannered conversation they regained the confidence denied them when they walked the dark streets of the town; evening dress was a sure charm against plague.

  Throughout the first act Orpheus lamented suavely his lost Eurydice, with women in Grecian tunics singing melodious comments on his plight, and love was hymned in alternating strophes. The audience showed their appreciation in discreet applause. Only a few people noticed that in his song of the second act Orpheus introduced some tremolos not in the score and voiced an almost exaggerated emotion when begging the lord of the Underworld to be moved by his tears. Some rather jerky movements he indulged in gave our connoisseurs of stagecraft an impression of clever, i
f slightly overdone, effects, intended to bring out the emotion of the words he sang.

  Not until the big duet between Orpheus and Eurydice

  in the third act—at the precise moment when Eurydice was slipping from her lover—did a flutter of surprise run through the house. And as though the singer had been waiting for this cue or, more likely, because the faint sounds that came to him from the orchestra seats confirmed what he was feeling, he chose this moment to stagger grotesquely to the footlights, his arms and legs splayed out under his antique robe, and fall down in the middle of the property sheepfold, always out of place, but now, in the eyes of the spectators, significantly, appallingly so. For at the same moment the orchestra stopped playing, the audience rose and began to leave the auditorium, slowly and silently at first, like worshippers leaving church when the service ends, or a death-chamber after a farewell visit to the dead, women lifting their skirts and moving with bowed heads, men steering the ladies by the elbow to prevent their brushing against the tip-up seats at the ends of the rows. But gradually their movements quickened, whispers rose to exclamations, and finally the crowd stampeded toward the exits, wedged together in the bottlenecks, and pouring out into the street in a confused mass, with shrill cries of dismay.

  Cottard and Tarrou, who had merely risen from their seats, gazed down at what was a dramatic picture of their life in those days: plague on the stage in the guise of a disarticulated mummer, and in the auditorium the toys of luxury, so futile now, forgotten fans and lace shawls derelict on the red plush seats.

  D

  Uring the first part of September Rambert had worked conscientiously at Rieux's side. He had merely asked for a few hours' leave on the day he was due to meet Gonzales and the two youngsters again outside the boys' school. Gonzales kept the appointment, at noon, and while he and the journalist were talking, they saw the two boys coming toward them, laughing. They said they'd had no luck last time, but that was only to be expected. Anyhow, it wasn't their turn for guard duty this week. Rambert must have patience till next week; then they'd have another shot at it. Rambert observed that "patience" certainly was needed in this business. Gonzales suggested they should all meet again on the following Monday, and this time Rambert had better move in to stay with Marcel and Louis. "We'll make a date, you and I. If I don't turn up, go straight to their place. I'll give you the address." But Marcel, or Louis, told him that the safest thing was to take his pal there right away, then he'd be sure of finding it. If he wasn't too particular, there was enough grub for the four of them. That way he'd get the hang of things. Gonzales agreed it was a good idea, and the four of them set off toward the harbor.

  Marcel and Louis lived on the outskirts of the dockyard, near the gate leading to the cliff road. It was a small Spanish house with gaily painted shutters and bare, dark rooms. The boys' mother, a wrinkled old Spanish woman with a smiling face, produced a dish of which the chief ingredient was rice. Gonzales showed surprise, as rice had been unprocurable for some time in the town. "We fix it up at the

  gate," Marcel explained. Rambert ate and drank heartily, and Gonzales informed him he was "a damned good sort." Actually the journalist was thinking solely of the coming week.

  It turned out that he had a fortnight to wait, as the periods of guard duty were extended to two weeks, to reduce the number of shifts. During that fortnight Rambert worked indefatigably, giving every ounce of himself, with his eyes shut, as it were, from dawn till night. He went to bed very late and always slept like a log. This abrupt transition from a life of idleness to one of constant work had left him almost void of thoughts or energy. He talked little about his impending escape. Only one incident is worth noting: after a week he confessed to the doctor that for the first time he'd got really drunk. It was the evening before; on leaving the bar he had an impression that his groin was swollen and he had pains in his armpits when he moved his arms. "I'm in for it!" he thought. And his only reaction—an absurd one, as he frankly admitted to Rieux—had been to start running to the upper town and when he reached a small square, from which if not the sea, a fairly big patch of open sky could be seen, to call to his wife with a great cry, over the walls of the town. On returning home and failing to discover any symptoms of plague on his body, he had felt far from proud of having given way like that. Rieux, however, said he could well understand one's being moved to act thus. "Or, anyhow, one may easily feel inclined that way."

  "Monsieur Othon was talking to me about you this morning," Rieux suddenly remarked, when Rambert was bidding him good night. "He asked me if I knew you, and I told him I did. Then he said: 'If he's a friend of yours advise him not to associate with smugglers. It's bound to attract attention.' "

  "Meaning—what?"

  "It means you'd better hurry up."

  "Thanks." Rambert shook the doctor's hand.

  In the doorway he suddenly swung round. Rieux noticed that, for the first time since the outbreak of plague, he was smiling.

  "Then why don't you stop my going? You could easily manage it."

  Rieux shook his head with his usual deliberateness. It was none of his business, he said. Rambert had elected for happiness, and he, Rieux, had no argument to put up against him. Personally he felt incapable of deciding which was the right course and which the wrong in such a case as Rambert's.

  "If that's so, why tell me to hurry up?"

  It was Rieux who now smiled.

  "Perhaps because I, too, would like to do my bit for happiness."

  Next day, though they were working together most of the time, neither referred to the subject. On the following Sunday Rambert moved into the little Spanish house. He was given a bed in the living-room. As the brothers did not come home for meals and he'd been told to go out as little as possible, he was always alone but for occasional meetings with the boys' mother. She was a dried-up little wisp of a woman, always dressed in black, busy as a bee, and she had a nut-brown, wrinkled face and immaculately white hair. No great-talker, she merely smiled genially when her eyes fell on Rambert.

  On one of the few occasions when she spoke, it was to ask him if he wasn't afraid of infecting his wife with plague. He replied that there might be some risk of that, but only a very slight one; while if he stayed in the town, there was a fair chance of their never seeing each other again.

  The old woman smiled. "Is she nice?" "Very nice."

  "Pretty?"

  "I think so."

  "Ah," she nodded, "that explains it."

  Rambert reflected. No doubt that explained it, but it was impossible that that alone explained it.

  The old woman went to Mass every morning. "Don't you believe in God?" she asked him.

  On Rambert's admitting he did not, she said again that "that explained it." "Yes," she added, "you're right. You must go back to her. Or else—what would be left you?"

  Rambert spent most of the day prowling round the room, gazing vaguely at the distempered walls, idly fingering the fans that were their only decoration, or counting the woolen balls on the tablecloth fringe. In the evening the youngsters came home; they hadn't much to say, except that the time hadn't come yet. After dinner Marcel played the guitar, and they drank an anise-flavored liqueur. Rambert seemed lost in thought.

  On Wednesday Marcel announced: "It's for tomorrow night, at midnight. Be ready on time." Of the two men sharing the sentry post with them, he explained, one had got plague and the other, who had slept in the same room, was now under observation. Thus for two or three days Marcel and Louis would be alone at the post. They'd fix up the final details in the course of the night, and he could count on them to see it through. Rambert thanked them.

  "Pleased?" the old woman asked.

  He said yes, but his thoughts were elsewhere.

  The next day was very hot and muggy and a heat-mist veiled the sun. The total of deaths had jumped up. But the old Spanish woman lost nothing of her serenity. "There's so much wickedness in the world," she said. "So what can you expect?"

  Like M
arcel and Louis, Rambert was stripped to the waist. But, even so, sweat was trickling down his chest and between his shoulder-blades. In the dim light of the shuttered room their torsos glowed like highly polished mahogany. Rambert kept prowling round like a caged animal,

  without speaking. Abruptly at four in the afternoon he announced that he was going out.

  "Don't forget," Marcel said. "At midnight sharp. Everything's set."

  Rambert went to the doctor's apartment. Rieux's mother told him he would find the doctor at the hospital in the upper town. As before, a crowd was circling in front of the entrance gates. "Move on, there!" a police sergeant with bulging eyes bawled every few minutes. And the crowd kept moving, but always in a circle. "No use hanging round here." The sergeant's coat was soaked in sweat. They knew it was "no use," but they stayed on, despite the devastating heat. Rambert showed his pass to the sergeant, who told him to go to Tarrou's office. Its door opened on the courtyard. He passed Father Paneloux, who was coming out of the office.