That night Tarrou, Rieux, Rambert, and their colleagues joined for a while the marching crowds and they, too, felt as if they trod on air. Long after they had turned off the main streets, even when in empty byways they walked past shuttered houses, the joyful clamor followed them up, and because of their fatigue somehow they could not disassociate the sorrow behind those closed shutters from the joy filling the central streets. Thus the coming liberation had a twofold aspect, of happiness and tears.
At one moment, when the cries of exultation in the distance were swelling to a roar, Tarrou stopped abruptly. A small, sleek form was scampering along the roadway: a cat, the first cat any of them had seen since the spring. It stopped in the middle of the road, hesitated, licked a paw and quickly passed it behind its right ear; then it started forward again and vanished into the darkness.
Tarrou smiled to himself; the little old man on the balcony, too, would be pleased.
BUT in those days when the plague seemed to be retreating, slinking back to the obscure lair from which it had stealthily emerged, at least one person in the town viewed this retreat with consternation, if Tarrou’s notes are to be trusted; and that man was Cottard.
To tell the truth, these diary notes take a rather curious turn from the date on which the death returns began to drop. The handwriting becomes much harder to read, this may have been due to fatigue, and the diarist jumps from one topic to another without transition. What is more, these later notes lack the objectivity of the earlier ones; personal considerations creep in. Thus, sandwiched between long passages dealing with the case of Cottard, we find a brief account of the old man and the cats. Tarrou conveys to us that the plague had in no wise lessened his appreciation of the old fellow, who continued equally to interest him after the epidemic had run its course; unfortunately, he could not go on interesting him, and this through no lack of good intentions on Tarrou’s part.
He had done his best to see him again. Some days after that memorable 25th of January he stationed himself at the corner of the little street. The cats were back at their usual places, basking in the patches of sunlight. But at the ritual hour the shutters stayed closed. And never once did Tarrou see them open on the following days. He drew the rather odd conclusion that the old fellow was either dead or vexed, if vexed, the reason being that he had thought that he was right and the plague had put him in the wrong; if dead, the question was (as in the case of the old asthmatic) had he been a saint? Tarrou hardly thought so, but he found in the old man’s case “a pointer.”
“Perhaps,” he wrote, “we can only reach approximations of sainthood. In which case we must make shift with a mild, benevolent diabolism.”
Interspersed with observations relating to Cottard are remarks, scattered here and there, about Grand, he was now convalescent and had gone back to work as if nothing had happened, and about Rieux’s mother. The occasional conversations he had with her, when living under the same roof, the old lady’s attitudes, her opinions on the plague, are all recorded in detail in the diary. Tarrou lays stress above all on Mme Rieux’s self-effacement, her way of explaining things in the simplest possible words, her predilection for a special window at which she always sat in the early evening, holding herself rather straight, her hands at rest, her eyes fixed on the quiet street below, until twilight filled the room and she showed among the gathering shadows as a motionless black form which gradually merged into the invading darkness.
He remarks on the “lightness” with which she moved from one room to the other; on her kindness, though no precise instances had come to his notice he discerned its gentle glow in all she said and did; on the gift she had of knowing everything without (apparently) taking thought; and lastly that, dim and silent though she was, she quailed before no light, even the garish light of the plague.
At this point Tarrou’s handwriting began to fall off oddly; indeed, the following lines were almost illegible. And, as if in confirmation of this loss of grip upon himself, the last lines of the entry deal, for the first time in the diary, with his personal life. “She reminds me of my mother; what I loved most in Mother was her self-effacement, her ‘dimness,’ as they say, and it’s she I’ve always wanted to get back to. It happened eight years ago; but I can’t say she died. She only effaced herself a trifle more than usual, and when I looked round she was no longer there.”
But to return to Cottard. When the weekly totals began to show a decline, he visited Rieux several times on various pretexts. But obviously what he really wanted was to get from Rieux his opinion on the probable course of the epidemic.
“Do you really think it can stop like that, all of a sudden?” He was skeptical about this, or anyhow professed to be. But the fact that he kept on asking the question seemed to imply he was less sure than he professed to be. From the middle of January Rieux gave him fairly optimistic answers. But these were not to Cottard’s liking, and his reactions varied on each occasion, from mere petulance to great despondency. One day the doctor was moved to tell him that, though the statistics were highly promising, it was too soon to say definitely that we were out of the wood.
“In other words,” Cottard said promptly, “there’s no knowing. It may start again at any moment.”
“Quite so. Just as it’s equally possible the improvement may speed up.” Distressing to everyone else, this state of uncertainty seemed to agree with Cottard. Tarrou observed that he would enter into conversations with shopkeepers in his part of the town, with the obvious desire of propagating the opinion expressed by Rieux. Indeed, he had no trouble in doing this. After the first exhilaration following the announcement of the plague’s decline had worn off, doubts had returned to many minds. And the sight of their anxiety reassured Cottard. Just as at other times he yielded to discouragement. “Yes,” he said gloomily to Tarrou, “one of these days the gates will be opened. And then, you’ll see, they’ll drop me like a live coal!”
Everyone was struck by his abrupt changes of mood during the first three weeks of January. Though normally he spared no pains to make himself liked by neighbors and acquaintances, now, for whole days, he deliberately cold-shouldered them. On these occasions, so Tarrou gathered, he abruptly cut off outside contacts and retired morosely into his shell. He was no more to be seen in restaurants or at the theater or in his favorite cafes.
However, he seemed unable to resume the obscure, humdrum life he had led before the epidemic. He stayed in his room and had his meals sent up from a near-by restaurant. Only at nightfall did he venture forth to make some small purchases, and on leaving the shop he would furtively roam the darker, less-frequented streets. Once or twice Tarrou ran into him on these occasions, but failed to elicit more than a few gruff monosyllables. Then, from one day to another, he became sociable again, talked volubly about the plague, asking everyone for his views on it, and mingled in the crowd with evident pleasure.
On January 25, the day of the official announcement, Cottard went to cover again. Two days later Tarrou came across him loitering in a side-street. When Cottard suggested he should accompany him home, Tarrou demurred; he’d had a particularly tiring day. But Cottard wouldn’t hear of a refusal. He seemed much agitated, gesticulated freely, spoke very rapidly and in a very loud tone. He began by asking Tarrou if he really thought the official communique meant an end of the plague. Tarrou replied that obviously a mere official announcement couldn’t stop an epidemic, but it certainly looked as if, barring accidents, it would shortly cease.
“Yes,” Cottard said. “Barring accidents. And accidents will happen, won’t they?” Tarrou pointed out that the authorities had allowed for that possibility by refusing
to open the gates for another fortnight.
“And very wise they were!” Cottard exclaimed in the same excited tone. “By the way things are going, I should say they’ll have to eat their words.”
Tarrou agreed this might be so; still, he thought it wiser to count on the opening of the gates and a return to normal life in the near future.
“Granted!” Cottard rejoined. “But what do you mean by ‘a return to normal life’?” Tarrou smiled. “New films at the picture-houses.”
But Cottard didn’t smile. Was it supposed, he asked, that the plague wouldn’t have changed anything and the life of the town would go on as before, exactly as if nothing had happened? Tarrou thought that the plague would have changed things and not changed them; naturally our fellow citizens’ strongest desire was, and would be, to behave as if nothing had changed and for that reason nothing would be changed, in a sense. But, to look at it from another angle, one can’t forget everything, however great one’s wish to do so; the plague was bound to leave traces, anyhow, in people’s hearts.
To this
