He went to bed very late and always slept like a log.
This abrupt transition from a life of idleness to one of constant work had left him almost void of thoughts or energy.
He talked little about his impending escape.
Only one incident is worth noting: after a week he confessed to the doctor that for the first time he’d got really drunk.
It was the evening before; on leaving the bar he had an impression that his groin was swollen and he had pains in his armpits when he moved his arms.
I’m in for it! he thought.
And his only reaction—an absurd one, as he frankly admitted to Rieux—had been to start running to the upper town and when he reached a small square, from which if not the sea, a fairly big patch of open sky could be seen, to call to his wife with a great cry, over the walls of the town.
On returning home and failing to discover any symptoms of plague on his body, he had felt far from proud of having given way like that.
Rieux, however, said he could well understand one’s being moved to act thus.
“Or, anyhow, one may easily feel inclined that way.”
“Monsieur Othon was talking to me about you this morning,” Rieux suddenly remarked, when Rambert was bidding him good night. “He asked me if I knew you, and I told him I did.
Then he said: ‘If he’s a friend of yours advise him not to associate with smugglers.
It’s bound to attract attention.”
“Meaning—what?”
“It means you’d better hurry up.”
“Thanks.” Rambert shook the doctor’s hand.
In the doorway he suddenly swung round.
Rieux noticed that, for the first time since the outbreak of plague, he was smiling.
“Then why don’t you stop my going?
You could easily manage it.”
Rieux shook his head with his usual deliberateness. It was none of his business, he said. Rambert had elected for happiness, and he, Rieux, had no argument to put up against him.
Personally he felt incapable of deciding which was the right course and which the wrong in such a case as Rambert’s.
“If that’s so, why tell me to hurry up?”
It was Rieux who now smiled.
“Perhaps because I, too, would like to do my bit for happiness.”
Next day, though they were working together most of the time, neither referred to the subject.
On the following Sunday Rambert moved into the little Spanish house.
He was given a bed in the living-room.
As the brothers did not come home for meals and he’d been told to go out as little as possible, he was always alone but for occasional meetings with the boys’ mother.
She was a dried-up little wisp of a woman, always dressed in black, busy as a bee, and she had a nut-brown, wrinkled face and immaculately white hair.
No great talker, she merely smiled genially when her eyes fell on Rambert.
On one of the few occasions when she spoke, it was to ask him if he wasn’t afraid of infecting his wife with plague. He replied that there might be some risk of that, but only a very slight one; while if he stayed in the town, there was a fair chance of their never seeing each other again.
The old woman smiled. “Is she nice?”
“Very nice.”
“Pretty?”
“I think so.”
“Ah,” she nodded, “that explains it.”
Rambert reflected.
No doubt that explained it, but it was impossible that that alone explained it.
The old woman went to Mass every morning. “Don’t you believe in God?” she asked him.
On Rambert’s admitting he did not, she said again that “that explained it.”
“Yes,” she added, “you’re right. You must go back to her.
Or else—what would be left you?”
Rambert spent most of the day prowling round the room, gazing vaguely at the distempered walls, idly fingering the fans that were their only decoration, or counting the woolen balls on the tablecloth fringe.
In the evening the youngsters came home; they hadn’t much to say, except that the time hadn’t come yet.
After dinner Marcel played the guitar, and they drank an anise-flavored liqueur.
Rambert seemed lost in thought.
On Wednesday Marcel announced:
“It’s for tomorrow night, at midnight. Be ready on time.”
Of the two men sharing the sentry post with them, he explained, one had got plague and the other, who had slept in the same room, was now under observation.