Yes, this unavailing quest which never left his mind had worn him out; nonetheless, he went on adding up the figures and compiling the statistics needed for the sanitary groups.
Patiently every evening he brought his totals up to date, illustrated them with graphs, and racked his brains to present his data in the most exact, clearest form.
Quite often he went to see Rieux at one of the hospitals and asked to be given a table in an office or the dispensary.
He would settle down at it with his papers, exactly as he settled down at his desk in the Municipal Office, and wave each completed sheet to dry the ink in the warm air, noisome with disinfectants and the disease itself.
At these times he made honest efforts not to think about his “horsewoman,” and concentrate on what he had to do.
Yes, if it is a fact that people like to have examples given them, men of the type they call heroic, and if it is absolutely necessary that this narrative should include a “hero,” the narrator commends to his readers, with, to his thinking, perfect justice, this insignificant and obscure hero who had to his credit only a little goodness of heart and a seemingly absurd ideal.
This will render to the truth its due, to the addition of two and two its sum of four, and to heroism the secondary place that rightly falls to it, just after, never before, the noble claim of happiness.
It will also give this chronicle its character, which is intended to be that of a narrative made with good feelings—that is to say, feelings that are neither demonstrably bad nor overcharged with emotion in the ugly manner of a stage-play.
Such at least was Dr. Rieux’s opinion when he read in newspapers or heard on the radio the messages and encouragement the outer world transmitted to the plague-ridden populace.
Besides the comforts sent by air or overland, compassionate or admiring comments were lavished on the henceforth isolated town, by way of newspaper articles or broadcast talks.
And invariably their epical or prize-speech verbiage jarred on the doctor.
Needless to say, he knew the sympathy was genuine enough.
But it could be expressed only in the conventional language with which men try to express what unites them with mankind in general; a vocabulary quite unsuited, for example, to Grand’s small daily effort, and incapable of describing what Grand stood for under plague conditions.
Sometimes at midnight, in the great silence of the sleep-bound town, the doctor turned on his radio before going to bed for the few hours’ sleep he allowed himself.
And from the ends of the earth, across thousands of miles of land and sea, kindly, well-meaning speakers tried to voice their fellow-feeling, and indeed did so, but at the same time proved the utter incapacity of every man truly to share in suffering that he cannot see.
“Oran!
Oran!”
In vain the call rang over oceans, in vain Rieux listened hopefully; always the tide of eloquence began to flow, bringing home still more the unbridgeable gulf that lay between Grand and the speaker.
“Oran, we’re with you!” they called emotionally.
But not, the doctor told himself, to love or to die together—“and that’s the only way.
They’re too remote.”
And, as it so happens, what has yet to be recorded before coming to the culmination, during the period when the plague was gathering all its forces to fling them at the town and lay it waste, is the long, heartrendingly monotonous struggle put up by some obstinate people like Rambert to recover their lost happiness and to balk the plague of that part of themselves which they were ready to defend in the last ditch.
This was their way of resisting the bondage closing in upon them, and while their resistance lacked the active virtues of the other, it had (to the narrator’s thinking) its point, and moreover it bore witness, even in its futility and incoherences, to a salutary pride.
Rambert fought to prevent the plague from besting him.
Once assured that there was no way of getting out of the town by lawful methods, he decided, as he told Rieux, to have recourse to others.
He began by sounding cafe waiters.
A waiter usually knows much of what’s going on behind the scenes.
But the first he spoke to knew only of the very heavy penalties imposed on such attempts at evasion.
In one of the cafes he visited he was actually taken for a stoolpigeon and curtly sent about his business.
It was not until he happened to meet Cottard at Rieux’s place that he made a little headway.
On that day he and Rieux had been talking again about his unsuccessful efforts to interest the authorities in his case, and Cottard heard the tail end of the conversation.
Some days later Cottard met him in the street and greeted him with the hail-fellow-well-met manner that he now used on all occasions.
“Hello, Rambert! Still no luck!”
“None whatever.”
“It’s no good counting on the red-tape merchants.
They couldn’t understand if they tried.”
“I know that, and I’m trying to find some other way.
But it’s damned difficult.”
“Yes,” Cottard replied. “It certainly is.”
He, however, knew a way to go about it, and he explained to Rambert, who was much surprised to learn this, that for some time past he had been going the rounds of the cafes, had made a number of acquaintances, and had learned of the existence of an “organization” handling this sort of business.
The truth was that Cottard, who had been beginning to live above his means, was now involved in smuggling ventures concerned with rationed goods.
Selling contraband cigarettes and inferior liquor at steadily rising prices, he was on the way to building up a small fortune.
“Are you quite sure of this?” Rambert asked.
“Quite. I had a proposal of the sort made to me the other day.”
“But you didn’t accept it.”
“Oh, come, there’s no need to be suspicious.” Cottard’s tone was genial. “I didn’t accept it because, personally, I’ve no wish to leave.
I have my reasons.”
After a short silence he added:
“You don’t ask me what my reasons are, I notice.”
“I take it,” Rambert replied, “that they’re none of my business.”