The rest of the story, to Grand’s thinking, was very simple.
The common lot of married couples. You get married, you go on loving a bit longer, you work.
And you work so hard that it makes you forget to love.
As the head of the office where Grand was employed hadn’t kept his promise, Jeanne, too, had to work outside.
At this point a little imagination was needed to grasp what Grand was trying to convey.
Owing largely to fatigue, he gradually lost his grip of himself, had less and less to say, and failed to keep alive the feeling in his wife that she was loved.
An overworked husband, poverty, the gradual loss of hope in a better future, silent evenings at home—what chance had any passion of surviving such conditions?
Probably Jeanne had suffered.
And yet she’d stayed; of course one may often suffer a long time without knowing it.
Thus years went by.
Then, one day, she left him.
Naturally she hadn’t gone alone.
“I was very fond of you, but now I’m so tired. I’m not happy to go, but one needn’t be happy to make another start.”
That, more or less, was what she’d said in her letter.
Grand, too, had suffered.
And he, too, might—as Rieux pointed out—have made a fresh start.
But no, he had lost faith.
Only, he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
What he’d have liked to do was to write her a letter justifying himself.
“But it’s not easy,” he told Rieux. “I’ve been thinking it over for years.
While we loved each other we didn’t need words to make ourselves understood.
But people don’t love forever.
A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me—only I couldn’t.”
Grand produced from his pocket something that looked like a check duster and blew his nose noisily. Then he wiped his mustache.
Rieux gazed at him in silence.
“Forgive me, Doctor,” Grand added hastily, “but—how shall I put it?—I feel you’re to be trusted.
That’s why I can talk to you about these things.
And then, you see, I get all worked up.”
Obviously Grand’s thoughts were leagues away from the plague.
That evening Rieux sent a telegram to his wife telling her that the town was closed, that she must go on taking great care of herself, and that she was in his thoughts.
One evening when he was leaving the hospital—it was about three weeks after the closing of the gates—Rieux found a young man waiting for him in the street.
“You remember me, don’t you?”
Rieux believed he did, but couldn’t quite place him.
“I called on you just before this trouble started,” the young man said, “for information about the living-conditions in the Arab quarter.
My name is Raymond Rambert.”
“Ah yes, of course. Well, you’ve now the makings of a good story for your paper.”
Rambert, who gave the impression of being much less self-assured than he had seemed on the first occasion when they met, said it wasn’t that he’d come about. He wanted to know if the doctor would kindly give him some help.
“I must apologize,” he continued, “but really I don’t know a soul here, and the local representative of my paper is a complete dud.”
Rieux said he had to go to a dispensary in the center of the town and suggested they should walk there together.
Their way lay through the narrow streets of the Negro district.
Evening was coming on, but the town, once so noisy at this hour, was strangely still.
The only sounds were some bugle-calls echoing through the air, still golden with the end of daylight; the army, anyhow, was making a show of carrying on as usual.
Meanwhile, as they walked down the steep little streets flanked by blue, mauve, and saffron-yellow walls, Rambert talked incessantly, as if his nerves were out of hand.
He had left his wife in Paris, he said.
Well, she wasn’t actually his wife, but it came to the same thing.
The moment the town was put into quarantine he had sent her a wire.
His impression then was that this state of things was quite temporary, and all he’d tried to do was to get a letter through to her.
But the post-office officials had vetoed this, his colleagues of the local press said they could do nothing for him, and a clerk in the Prefect’s office had laughed in his face.
It was only after waiting in line for a couple of hours that he had managed to get a telegram accepted: All goes well.
Hope to see you soon.