No, all those horrors were not near enough as yet even to ruffle the equanimity of that spring afternoon. The clang of an unseen streetcar came through the window, briskly refuting cruelty and pain. Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world. And, gazing in the direction of the bay, Dr. Rieux called to mind the plague-fires of which Lucretius tells, which the Athenians kindled on the seashore.
The dead were brought there after nightfall, but there was not room enough, and the living fought one another with torches for a space where to lay those who had been dear to them; for they had rather engage in bloody conflicts than abandon their dead to the waves. A picture rose before him of the red glow of the pyres mirrored on a wine-dark, slumbrous sea, battling torches whirling sparks across the darkness, and thick, fetid smoke rising toward the watchful sky. Yes, it was not beyond the bounds of possibility….
But these extravagant forebodings dwindled in the light of reason. True, the word «plague» had been uttered; true, at this very moment one or two victims were being seized and laid low by the disease. Still, that could stop, or be stopped. It was only a matter of lucidly recognizing what had to be recognized; of dispelling extraneous shadows and doing what needed to be done. Then the plague would come to an end, because it was unthinkable, or, rather, because one thought of it on misleading lines. If, as was most likely, it died out, all would be well. If not, one would know it anyhow for what it was and what steps should be taken for coping with and finally overcoming it.
The doctor opened the window, and at once the noises of the town grew louder. The brief, intermittent sibilance of a machine-saw came from a near-by workshop. Rieux pulled himself together. There lay certitude; there, in the daily round.
All the rest hung on mere threads and trivial contingencies; you couldn’t waste your time on it. The thing was to do your job as it should be done.
The doctor’s musings had reached this point when the visit of Joseph Grand was announced. Grand’s duties as clerk in the Municipal Office were varied, and he was sometimes employed in the statistical department on compiling the figures of births, marriages, and deaths. Thus it had fallen to him to add up the number of deaths during the last few days, and, being of an obliging disposition, he had volunteered to bring a copy of the latest figures to the doctor.
Grand, who was waving a sheet of paper, was accompanied by his neighbor, Cottard.
«The figures are going up, doctor. Eleven deaths in forty-eight hours.»
Rieux shook hands with Cottard and asked him how he was feeling. Grand put in a word explaining that Cottard was bent on thanking the doctor and apologizing for the trouble he had given. But Rieux was gazing frowningly at the figures on the sheet of paper.
«Well,» he said, «perhaps we’d better make up our minds to call this disease by its name. So far we’ve been only shillyshallying. Look here, I’m off to the laboratory; like to come with me?»
«Quite so, quite so,» Grand said as he went down the stairs at the doctor’s heels. «I, too, believe in calling things by their name. But what’s the name in this case?»
«That I shan’t say, and anyhow you wouldn’t gain, anything by knowing.» «You see,» Grand smiled. «It’s not so easy after all!»
They started off toward the Place d’Armes. Cottard still kept silent. The streets were beginning to fill up. The brief dusk of our town was already giving place to night, and the first stars glimmered above the still clearly marked horizon. A few moments later all the street-lamps went on, dimming the sky, and the voices in the street seemed to rise a tone.
«Excuse me,» Grand said at the corner of the Place d’Armes, «but I must catch my car now. My evenings are sacred. As we say in my part of the world: ‘Never put off to tomorrow?'»
Rieux had already noticed Grand’s trick of professing to quote some turn of speech from «his part of the world» (he hailed from Montélimar), and following up with some such hackneyed expression as «lost in dreams,» or «pretty as a picture.»
«That’s so,» Cottard put in. «You can never budge him from his den after dinner.» Rieux asked Grand if he was doing extra work for the municipality. Grand said no, he was working on his own account.
«Really?» Rieux said, to keep the conversation going. «And are you getting on well with it?»
«Considering I’ve been at it for years, it would be surprising if I wasn’t. Though in one sense there hasn’t been much progress.»
«May one know», the doctor halted, «what it is that you’re engaged on?»
Grand put a hand up to his hat and tugged it down upon his big, protruding ears, then murmured some half-inaudible remark from which Rieux seemed to gather that Grand’s work was connected with «the growth of a personality.» Then he turned rather hastily and a moment later was hurrying, with short, quick steps, under the fig trees lining the boulevard de la Marne.
When they were at the laboratory gate, Cottard told the doctor that he would greatly like to see him and ask his advice about something. Rieux, who was fingering in his pocket the sheet of paper with the figures on it, said he’d better call during his consulting-hours; then, changing his mind, told him he would be in his part of the town next day and would drop in to see him at the end of the afternoon.
On leaving Cottard the doctor noticed that he was thinking of Grand, trying to picture him in the midst of an outbreak of plague, not an outbreak like the present one, which would probably not prove serious, but like one of the great visitations of the past. «He’s the kind of man who always escapes in such cases.» Rieux remembered having read somewhere that the plague spared weak constitutions and chose its victims chiefly among the robust. Still thinking of Grand, he decided that he was something of a «mystery man» in his small way.
True, at first sight, Grand manifested both the outward signs and typical manner of a humble employee in the local administration. Tall and thin, he seemed lost in the garments that he always chose a size too large, under the illusion that they would wear longer. Though he still had most of the teeth in his lower jaw, all the upper ones were gone, with the result that when he smiled, raising his upper lip, the lower scarcely moved, his mouth looked like a small black hole let into his face.
Also he had the walk of a shy young priest, sidling along walls and slipping mouse-like into doorways, and he exuded a faint odor of smoke and basement rooms; in short, he had all the attributes of insignificance.
Indeed, it cost an effort to picture him otherwise than bent over a desk, studiously revising the tariff of the town baths or gathering for a junior secretary the materials of a report on the new garbage-collection tax. Even before you knew what his employment was, you had a feeling that he’d been brought into the world for the sole purpose of performing the discreet but needful duties of a temporary assistant municipal clerk on a salary of sixty-two francs, thirty centimes a day.
This was, in fact, the entry that he made each month in the staff register at the Municipal Office, in the column Post in Which Employed. When twenty-two years previously, after obtaining a matriculation certificate beyond which, for lack of money, he was unable to progress, he was given this temporary post, he had been led to expect, or so he said, speedy «confirmation» in it. It was only a matter of proving his ability to cope with the delicate problems raised by the administration of our city. Once confirmed, they had assured him, he couldn’t fail to be promoted to a grade that would enable him to live quite comfortably.
Ambition, certainly, was not the spur that activated Joseph Grand; that he would swear to, wryly smiling. All he desired was the prospect of a life suitably insured on the material side by honest work, enabling him to devote his leisure to his hobbies. If he’d accepted the post offered him, it was from honorable motives and, if he might say so, loyalty to an ideal.
But this «temporary» state of things had gone on and on, the cost of living rose by leaps and bounds, and Grand’s pay, in spite of some statutory rises, was still a mere pittance.
He had confided this to Rieux, but nobody else seemed aware of his position. And here lies Grand’s originality, or anyhow an indication of it. He could certainly have brought to official notice, if not his rights, of which he wasn’t sure, at least the promises given him. But, for one thing, the departmental head who had made them had been dead for some time and, furthermore, Grand no longer remembered their exact terms. And lastly, this was the real trouble, Joseph Grand couldn’t find his words.
This peculiarity,
