And, anyhow, that would mean it’s going to last many months more.”
Moreover, he was sure that for a long while to come travelers would give the town a wide berth.
This epidemic spelt the ruin of the tourist trade, in fact.
After a short absence M. Othon, the owlish paterfamilias, made a reappearance in the restaurant, but accompanied only by the two “performing poodles,” his offspring.
On inquiry it came out that Mme. Othon was in quarantine; she had been nursing her mother, who had succumbed to plague.
“I don’t like it a bit,” the manager told Tarrou. “Quarantine or not, she’s under suspicion, which means that they are, too.”
Tarrou pointed out that, if it came to that, everyone was “under suspicion.”
But the manager had his own ideas and was not to be shaken out of them.
“No, sir. You and I, we’re not under suspicion.
But they certainly are.”
However, M. Othon was impervious to such considerations and would not let the plague change his habits.
He entered the restaurant with his wonted dignity, sat down in front of his children, and addressed to them at intervals the same nicely worded, unamiable remarks.
Only the small boy looked somewhat different; dressed in black like his sister, a little more shrunken than before, he now seemed a miniature replica of his father.
The night watchman, who had no liking of M. Othon, had said of him to Tarrou:
“That fine gentleman will pass out with his clothes on.
All dressed up and ready to go.
So he won’t need no laying-out.”
Tarrou has some comments on the sermon preached by Paneloux:
“I can understand that type of fervor and find it not displeasing.
At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric.
In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they’re returning.
It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth—in other words, to silence.
So let’s wait.”
Tarrou also records that he had a long talk with Dr. Rieux; all he remembered was that it had “good results.” In this connection he notes the color of Mme. Rieux’s, the doctor’s mother’s, eyes, a limpid brown, and makes the odd observation that a gaze revealing so much goodness of heart would always triumph over plague. He has also a good deal to say about Rieux’s asthma patient.
He went with the doctor to see him, immediately after their conversation.
The old man greeted Tarrou with a chuckle and rubbed his hands cheerfully.
He was sitting up in bed with the usual two pans of dried peas in front of him.
“Ah, here’s another of ’em!” he exclaimed when he saw Tarrou. “It’s a topsy-turvy world all right, more doctors than patients.
Because it’s mowing them down, ain’t it, more and more.
That priest’s right; we were asking for it.”
Next day Tarrou came to see him without warning.
From Tarrou’s notes we gather that the old man, a dry-goods dealer by occupation, decided at the age of fifty that he’d done enough work for a lifetime.
He took to his bed and never left it again—but not because of his asthma, which would not have prevented his getting about.
A small fixed income had seen him through to his present age, seventy-five, and the years had not damped his cheerfulness.
He couldn’t bear the sight of a watch, and indeed there wasn’t one in the whole house.
“Watches,” he said, “are silly gadgets, and dear at that.”
He worked out the time—that is to say, the time for meals—with his two saucepans, one of which was always full of peas when he woke in the morning.
He filled the other, pea by pea, at a constant, carefully regulated speed.
Thus time for him was reckoned by these pans and he could take his bearings in it at any moment of the day.
“Every fifteen pans,” he said, “it’s feeding-time.
What could be simpler?”
If his wife was to be trusted, he had given signs of his vocation at a very early age.
Nothing, in fact, had ever interested him; his work, friendship, cafes, music, women, outings—to all he was indifferent.
He had never left his home town except once when he had been called to Algiers for family affairs, and even then he had alighted from the train at the first station after Oran, incapable of continuing the adventure. He took the first train back.
To Tarrou, who had shown surprise at the secluded life he led, he had given the following explanation, more or less. According to religion, the first half of a man’s life is an upgrade; the second goes downhill. On the descending days he had no claim, they may be snatched from him at any moment; thus he can do nothing with them and the best thing, precisely, is to do nothing with them.
He obviously had no compunction about contradicting himself, for a few minutes later he told Tarrou that God did not exist, since otherwise there would be no need for priests.
But, from some observations which followed, Tarrou realized that the old fellow’s philosophy was closely involved with the irritation caused by the house-to-house collections in aid of charities, which took place almost incessantly in that part of the town.
What completed the picture of the old man was a desire he expressed several times, and which seemed deeply rooted: the desire to die at a very advanced age.
“Is he a saint?” Tarrou asked himself, and answered: “Yes, if saintliness is an aggregate of habits.”
Meanwhile Tarrou was compiling a longish description of a day in the plague-stricken town; it was to give a full and accurate picture of the life of our fellow citizens during that summer.