Beyond it lay the tranquil radiance of a cool spring sky; inside the room a word was echoing still, the word “plague.”
A word that conjured up in the doctor’s mind not only what science chose to put into it, but a whole series of fantastic possibilities utterly out of keeping with that gray and yellow town under his eyes, from which were rising the sounds of mild activity characteristic of the hour; a drone rather than a bustling, the noises of a happy town, in short, if it’s possible to be at once so dull and happy.
A tranquillity so casual and thoughtless seemed almost effortlessly to give the lie to those old pictures of the plague: Athens, a charnel-house reeking to heaven and deserted even by the birds; Chinese towns cluttered up with victims silent in their agony; the convicts at Marseille piling rotting corpses into pits; the building of the Great Wall in Provence to fend off the furious plague-wind; the damp, putrefying pallets stuck to the mud floor at the Constantinople lazar-house, where the patients were hauled up from their beds with hooks; the carnival of masked doctors at the Black Death; men and women copulating in the cemeteries of Milan; cartloads of dead bodies rumbling through London’s ghoul-haunted darkness—nights and days filled always, everywhere, with the eternal cry of human pain.
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 shilly-shallying.
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 Montelimar), 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?”