«I got him down just in time.» Grand seemed always to have trouble in finding his words, though he expressed himself in the simplest possible way. «I was going out and I heard a noise. When I saw that writing on the door, I thought it was a a prank. Only, then I heard a funny sort of groan; it made my blood run cold, as they say.» He scratched his head. «That must be a painful way of of doing it, I should think. Naturally I went in.»
Grand had opened a door and they were standing on the threshold of a bright but scantily furnished bedroom. There was a brass bedstead against one of the walls, and a plump little man was lying there, breathing heavily. He gazed at them with bloodshot eyes. Rieux stopped short. In the intervals of the man’s breathing he seemed to hear the little squeals of rats. But he couldn’t see anything moving in the corners of the room. Then he went to the bedside. Evidently the man had not fallen from a sufficient height, or very suddenly, for the collar-bone had held.
Naturally there was some asphyxia. An X-ray photograph would be needed. Meanwhile the doctor gave him a camphor injection and assured him he would be
all right in a few days.
«Thanks, doctor,» the man mumbled.
When Rieux asked Grand if he had notified the police, he hung his head. «Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t. The first thing, I thought, was to?» «Quite so,» Rieux cut in. «I’ll see to it.»
But the invalid made a fretful gesture and sat up in bed. He felt much better, he explained; really it wasn’t worth the trouble.
«Don’t feel alarmed,» Rieux said. «It’s little more than a formality. Anyhow, I have to report this to the police.»
«Oh!» The man slumped back on the bed and started sobbing weakly.
Grand, who had been twiddling his mustache while they were speaking, went up to the bed.
«Come, Monsieur Cottard,» he said. «Try to understand. People could say the doctor was to blame, if you took it into your head to have another shot at it.»
Cottard assured him tearfully that there wasn’t the least risk of that; he’d had a sort of crazy fit, but it had passed and all he wanted now was to be left in peace. Rieux was writing a prescription.
«Very well,» he said. «We’ll say no more about it for the present. I’ll come and see you again in a day or two. But don’t do anything silly.»
On the landing he told Grand that he was obliged to make a report, but would ask the police inspector to hold up the inquiry for a couple of days.
«But somebody should watch Cottard tonight,» he added. «Has he any relations?» «Not that I know of. But I can very well stay with him. I can’t say I really know him, but one’s got to help a neighbor, hasn’t one?»
As he walked down the stairs Rieux caught himself glancing into the darker corners, and he asked Grand if the rats had quite disappeared in his part of the town.
Grand had no idea. True, he’d heard some talk about rats, but he never paid much attention to gossip like that. «I’ve other things to think about,» he added.
Rieux, who was in a hurry to get away, was already shaking his hand. There was a letter to write to his wife, and he wanted to see the concierge first.
News-venders were shouting the latest news that the rats had disappeared. But Rieux found his patient leaning over the edge of the bed, one hand pressed to his belly and the other to his neck, vomiting pinkish bile into a slop-pail.
After retching for some moments, the man lay back again, gasping. His temperature was 103, the ganglia of his neck and limbs were swollen, and two black patches were developing on his thighs. He now complained of internal pains.
«It’s like fire,» he whimpered. «The bastard’s burning me inside.»
He could hardly get the words through his fever-crusted lips and he gazed at the doctor with bulging eyes that his headache had suffused with tears. His wife cast an anxious look at Rieux, who said nothing.
«Please, doctor,» she said, «what is it?»
«It might be almost anything. There’s nothing definite as yet. Keep him on a light diet and give him plenty to drink.»
The sick man had been complaining of a raging thirst.
On returning to his apartment Rieux rang up his colleague Richard, one of the leading practitioners in the town.
«No,» Richard said, «I can’t say I’ve noticed anything exceptional.» «No cases of fever with local inflammation?»
«Wait a bit! I have two cases with inflamed ganglia.» «Abnormally so?»
«Well,» Richard said, «that depends on what you mean by ‘normal.'»
Anyhow, that night the porter was running a temperature of 104 and in delirium, always babbling about «them rats.» Rieux tried a fixation abscess. When he felt the sting of the turpentine, the old man yelled: «The bastards!»
The ganglia had become still larger and felt like lumps of solid fibrous matter embedded in the flesh. Mme Michel had completely broken down.
«Sit up with him,» the doctor said, «and call me if necessary.»
Next day, April 30, the sky was blue and slightly misty. A warm, gentle breeze was blowing, bringing with it a smell of flowers from the outlying suburbs. The morning noises of the streets sounded louder, gayer than usual. For everyone in our little town this day brought the promise of a new lease of life, now that the shadow of fear under which they had been living for a week had lifted.
Rieux, too, was in an optimistic mood when he went down to see the concierge; he had been cheered up by a letter from his wife that had come with the first mail.
Old M. Michel’s temperature had gone down to 99 and, though he still looked very weak, he was smiling. «He’s better, doctor, isn’t he?» his wife inquired. «Well, it’s a bit too early to say.»
At noon the sick man’s temperature shot up abruptly to 104, he was in constant delirium and had started vomiting again. The ganglia in the neck were painful to the touch, and the old man seemed to be straining to hold his head as far as possible from his body. His wife sat at the foot of the bed, her hands on the counterpane, gently clasping his feet. She gazed at Rieux imploringly.
«Listen,» he said, «we’ll have to move him to a hospital and try a special treatment. I’ll ring up for the ambulance.»
Two hours later the doctor and Mme Michel were in the ambulance bending over the sick man. Rambling words were issuing from the gaping mouth, thickly coated now with sores. He kept on repeating: «Them rats! Them damned rats!» His face had gone livid, a grayish green, his lips were bloodless, his breath came in sudden gasps. His limbs spread out by the ganglia, embedded in the berth as if he were trying to bury himself in it or a voice from the depths of the earth were summoning him below, the unhappy man seemed to be stifling under some unseen pressure. His wife was sobbing.
«Isn’t there any hope left, doctor?» «He’s dead,» said Rieux.
Michel’s death marked, one might say, the end of the first period, that of bewildering portents, and the beginning of another, relatively more trying, in which the perplexity of the early days gradually gave place to panic. Reviewing that first phase in the light of subsequent events, our townsfolk realized that they had never dreamed it possible that our little town should be chosen out for the scene of such grotesque happenings as the wholesale death of rats in broad daylight or the decease of concierges through exotic maladies. In this respect they were wrong, and their views obviously called for revision.
Still, if things had gone thus far and no farther, force of habit would doubtless have gained the day, as usual. But other members of our community, not all menials or poor people, were to follow the path down which M. Michel had led the way. And it was then that fear, and with fear serious reflection, began.
However, before entering on a detailed account of the next phase, the narrator proposes to give the opinion of another witness on the period that has been described.
Jean Tarrou, whose acquaintance we have already made at the beginning of this narrative, had come to Oran some weeks before and was staying in a big hotel in the center of the town. Apparently he had private means and was not engaged in business. But though he gradually became a familiar figure in our midst, no one knew where he hailed from or what had brought him to Oran.
He was often to be seen in public and at the beginning of spring was seen on one or other of the beaches almost every day; obviously he was fond of swimming. Good-humored, always ready with a smile, he seemed an addict of all normal pleasures without being their slave. In fact, the only habit he was known to have was that of cultivating the society of the Spanish dancers and musicians who abound in our town.
His notebooks comprise a sort of chronicle of those strange early days we all lived through. But an unusual type of chronicle, since the writer seems to make a point of understatement, and at first sight we might almost imagine that
