All Souls’ Day that year was very different from what it had been in former years. True, the weather was seasonable; there had been sudden change, and the great heat had given place to mild autumnal air. As in other years a cool wind blew all day, and big clouds raced from one horizon to the other, trailing shadows over the houses upon which fell again, when they had passed, the pale gold light of a November sky.
The first waterproofs made their appearance. Indeed, one was struck by the number of glossy, rubberized garments to be seen. The reason was that our newspapers had informed us that two hundred years previously, during the great pestilences of southern Europe, the doctors wore oiled clothing as a safeguard against infection. The shops had seized this opportunity of unloading their stock of out-of-fashion waterproofs, which their purchasers fondly hoped would guarantee immunity from germs.
But these familiar aspects of All Souls’ Day could not make us forget that the cemeteries were left unvisited. In previous years the rather sickly smell of chrysanthemums had filled the streetcars, while long lines of women could be seen making pilgrimage to the places where members of the family were buried, to lay flowers on the graves. This was the day when they made amends for the oblivion and dereliction in which their dead had slept for many a long month.
But in the plague year people no longer wished to be reminded of their dead. Because, indeed, they were thinking all too much about them as it was. There was
no more question of revisiting them with a shade of regret and much melancholy. They were no longer the forsaken to whom, one day in the year, you came to
justify yourself. They were intruders whom you would rather forget. This is why the Day of the Dead this year was tacitly but willfully ignored. As Cottard dryly remarked, Tarrou noted that the habit of irony was growing on him more and more, each day was for us a Day of the Dead.
And, in fact, the balefires of the pestilence were blazing ever more merrily in the crematorium. It is true that the actual number of deaths showed no increase.
But it seemed that plague had settled in for good at its most virulent, and it took its daily toll of deaths with the punctual zeal of a good civil servant.
Theoretically, and in the view of the authorities, this was a hopeful sign. The fact that the graph after its long rising curve had flattened out seemed to many, Dr. Richard for example, reassuring. «The graph’s good today,» he would remark, rubbing his hands. To his mind the disease had reached what he called high-water mark. Thereafter it could but ebb. He gave the credit of this to Dr. Castel’s new serum, which, indeed, had brought off some quite unlooked-for recoveries.
While not dissenting, the old doctor reminded him that the future remained uncertain; history proved that epidemics have a way of recrudescing when least expected. The authorities, who had long been desirous of giving a fillip to the morale of the populace, but had so far been prevented by the plague from doing so, now proposed to convene a meeting of the medical corps and ask for an announcement on the subject. Unfortunately, just before the meeting was due to take place, Dr. Richard, too, was carried off by the plague, then precisely at «high-water mark.»
The effect of this regrettable event, which, sensational as it was, actually proved nothing, was to make our authorities swing back to pessimism as inconsequently as they had previously indulged in optimism. As for Castel, he confined himself to preparing his serums with the maximum of care. By this time no public place or building had escaped conversion into a hospital or quarantine camp with the exception of the Prefect’s offices, which were needed for administrative purposes and committee meetings. In a general way, however, owing to the relative stability of the epidemic at this time, Rieux’s organizations were still able to cope with the situation. Though working constantly at high pressure, the doctors and their helpers were not forced to contemplate still greater efforts.
All they had to do was to carry on automatically, so to speak, their all but superhuman task. The pneumonic type of infection, cases of which had already been detected, was now spreading all over the town; one could almost believe that the high winds were kindling and fanning its flames in people’s chests. The victims of pneumonic plague succumbed much more quickly, after coughing up blood-stained sputum. This new form of the epidemic looked like being more contagious as well as even more fatal. However, the opinions of experts had always been divided on this matter. For greater safety all sanitary workers wore masks of sterilized muslin. On the face of it, the disease should have extended its ravages. But, the cases of bubonic plague showing a decrease, the death-rate remained constant.
Meanwhile the authorities had another cause for anxiety in the difficulty of maintaining the food-supply. Profiteers were taking a hand and purveying at enormous prices essential foodstuffs not available in the shops. The result was that poor families were in great straits, while the rich went short of practically nothing. Thus, whereas plague by its impartial ministrations should have promoted equality among our townsfolk, it now had the opposite effect and, thanks to the habitual conflict of cupidities, exacerbated the sense of injustice rankling in men’s hearts. They were assured, of course, of the inerrable equality of death, but nobody wanted that kind of equality.
Poor people who were feeling the pinch thought still more nostalgically of towns and villages in the near-by countryside, where bread was cheap and life without restrictions. Indeed, they had a natural if illogical feeling that they should have been permitted to move out to these happier places. The feeling was embodied in a slogan shouted in the streets and chalked up on walls: «Bread or fresh air!» This half-ironical battle-cry was the signal for some demonstrations that, though easily repressed, made everyone aware that an ugly mood was developing among us.
The newspapers, needless to say, complied with the instructions given them: optimism at all costs. If one was to believe what one read in them, our populace was giving «a fine example of courage and composure.» But in a town thrown back upon itself, in which nothing could be kept secret, no one had illusions about the «example» given by the public. To form a correct idea about the courage and composure talked about by our journalists you had only to visit one of the quarantine depots or isolation camps established by our authorities. As it so happens, the narrator, being fully occupied elsewhere, had no occasion to visit any of them, and must fall back on Tarrou’s diary for a description of the conditions in these places.
Tarrou gives an account of a visit he made, accompanied by Rambert, to the camp located in the municipal stadium.
The stadium lies on the outskirts of the town, between a street along which runs a car line and a stretch of waste land extending to the extreme edge of the plateau on which Oran is built. It was already surrounded by high concrete walls and all that was needed to make escape practically impossible was to post sentries at the four entrance gates. The walls served another purpose: they screened the unfortunates in quarantine from the view of people on the road.
Against this advantage may be set the fact that the inmates could hear all day, though they could not see them, the passing streetcars, and recognize by the increased volume of sound coming from the road the hours when people had knocked off work or were going to it. And this brought home to them that the life from which they were debarred was going on as before, within a few yards of them, and that those high walls parted two worlds as alien to each other as two different planets.
Tarrou and Rambert chose a Sunday afternoon for their visit to the stadium. They were accompanied by Gonzales, the football-player, with whom Rambert had kept in contact and who had let himself be persuaded into undertaking, in rotation with others, the surveillance of the camp. This visit was to enable Rambert to introduce Gonzales to the camp commandant. When they met that afternoon, Gonzales’s first remark was that this was exactly the time when, before the plague, he used to start getting into his football togs. Now that the sports fields had been requisitioned, all that was of the past, and Gonzales was feeling, and showed it, at a loose end. This was one of the reasons why he had accepted the post proposed by Rambert, but he made it a condition that he was to be on duty during week-ends only.
The sky was overcast and, glancing up at it, Gonzales observed regretfully that a day like this, neither too hot nor rainy, would have been perfect for a game.
And then he fell to conjuring up, as best he could, the once familiar smell of embrocation in the dressing-rooms, the stands crowded with people, the colored shirts of the players, showing up brightly against the tawny soil, the lemons at intermission or bottled lemonade that titillated parched throats with a thousand refreshing pin-pricks. Tarrou also records how on the way, as they walked the shabby outer streets, the footballer gave kicks to all the small loose
