Another meeting was arranged.
Gonzales suggested their dining together on the next day but one, at the Spanish restaurant.
It was at easy walking-distance from where the young men lived.
“For the first night,” he added, “I’ll keep you company, old boy.”
Next day on his way to his bedroom Rambert met Tarrou coming down the stairs at the hotel.
“Like to come with me?” he asked. “I’m just off to see Rieux.”
Rambert hesitated. “Well, I never feel sure I’m not disturbing him.”
“I don’t think you need worry about that; he’s talked about you quite a lot.”
The journalist pondered.
Then, “Look here,” he said. “If you’ve any time to spare after dinner, never mind how late, why not come to the hotel, both of you, and have a drink with me?”
“That will depend on Rieux.” Tarrou sounded doubtful. “And on the plague,” said Tarrou.
At eleven o’clock that night, however, Rieux and Tarrou entered the small, narrow bar of the hotel.
Some thirty people were crowded into it, all talking at the top of their voices.
Coming from the silence of the plague-bound town, the two newcomers were startled by the sudden burst of noise, and halted in the doorway.
They understood the reason for it when they saw that liquor was still to be had here.
Rambert, who was perched on a stool at a corner of the bar, beckoned to them.
With complete coolness he elbowed away a noisy customer beside him to make room for his friends.
“You’ve no objection to a spot of something strong?”
“No,” Tarrou replied. “Quite the contrary.”
Rieux sniffed the pungency of bitter herbs in the drink that Rambert handed him.
It was hard to make oneself heard in the din of voices, but Rambert seemed chiefly concerned with drinking.
The doctor couldn’t make up his mind whether he was drunk yet.
At one of the two tables that occupied all the remaining space beyond the half-circle round the bar, a naval officer, with a girl on each side of him, was describing to a fat, red-faced man a typhus epidemic at Cairo.
“They had camps, you know,” he was saying, “for the natives, with tents for the sick ones and a ring of sentries all round. If a member of the family came along and tried to smuggle in one of those damn-fool native remedies, they fired at sight.
A bit tough, I grant you, but it was the only thing to do.”
At the other table, round which sat a bevy of bright young people, the talk was incomprehensible, half drowned by the stridence of St. James Infirmary coming from a loud-speaker just above their heads.
“Any luck?” Rieux had to raise his voice.
“I’m getting on,” Rambert replied. “In the course of the week, perhaps.”
“A pity!” Tarrou shouted.
“Why?”
“Oh,” Rieux put in,
“Tarrou said that because he thinks you might be useful to us here. But, personally, I understand your wish to get away only too well.”
Tarrou stood the next round of drinks.
Rambert got off his stool and looked him in the eyes for the first time.
“How could I be useful?”
“Why, of course,” Tarrou replied, slowly reaching toward his glass, “in one of our sanitary squads.”
The look of brooding obstinacy that Rambert so often had came back to his face, and he climbed again onto his stool.
“Don’t you think these squads of ours do any good?” asked Tarrou, who had just taken a sip of his glass and was gazing hard at Rambert.
“I’m sure they do,” the journalist replied, and drank off his glass.
Rieux noticed that his hand was shaking, and he decided, definitely, that the man was far gone in drink.
Next day, when for the second time Rambert entered the Spanish restaurant, he had to make his way through a group of men who had taken chairs out on the sidewalk and were sitting in the green-gold evening light, enjoying the first breaths of cooler air.
They were smoking an acrid-smelling tobacco.
The restaurant itself was almost empty.
Rambert went to the table at the back at which Gonzales had sat when they met for the first time.
He told the waitress he would wait a bit.
It was seven thirty.
In twos and threes the men from outside began to dribble in and seat themselves at the tables.
The waitresses started serving them, and a tinkle of knives and forks, a hum of conversation, began to fill the cellarlike room.
At eight Rambert was still waiting.
The lights were turned on.