Fahrenheit 451, Page 9

  "Damn it!" cried Montag. "What do you know about Hoag and Noble!"

  "Why, they were right in that parlor wall, not six months ago. One was always picking his nose; it drove me wild."

  "Well, Mr. Montag," said Mrs. Phelps, "do you want us to vote for a man like that?"

  Mildred beamed. "You just run away from the door, Guy, and don't make us nervous."

  But Montag was gone and back in a moment with a book in his hand.

  "Guy!"

  "Damn it all, damn it all, damn it!"

  "What've you got there; isn't that a book? I thought that all special training these days was done by film." Mrs. Phelps blinked. "You reading up on fireman theory?"

  "Theory, hell," said Montag. "It's poetry."

  "Montag." A whisper.

  "Leave me alone!" Montag felt himself turning in a great circling roar and buzz and hum.

  "Montag, hold on, don't . . ."

  "Did you hear them, did you hear these monsters talking about monsters? Oh God, the way they jabber about people and their own children and themselves and the way they talk about their husbands and the way they talk about war, dammit, I stand here and I can't believe it!"

  "I didn't say a single word about any war, I'll have you know," said Mrs. Phelps.

  "As for poetry, I hate it," said Mrs. Bowles.

  "Have you ever heard any?"

  "Montag," Faber's voice scraped away at him. "You'll ruin everything. Shut up, you fool!"

  All three women were on their feet.

  "Sit down!"

  They sat.

  "I'm going home," quavered Mrs. Bowles.

  "Montag, Montag, please, in the name of God, what're you up to?" pleaded Faber.

  "Why don't you just read us one of those poems from your little book." Mrs. Phelps nodded. "I think that'd be very interesting."

  "That's not right," wailed Mrs. Bowles. "We can't do that!"

  "Well, look at Mr. Montag, he wants to, I know he does. And if we listen nice, Mr. Montag will be happy and then maybe we can go on and do something else." She glanced nervously at the long emptiness of the walls enclosing them.

  "Montag, go through with this and I'll cut off, I'll leave." The beetle jabbed his ear. "What good is this, what'll you prove!"

  "Scare hell out of them, that's what, scare the living daylights out!"

  Mildred looked at the empty air. "Now, Guy, just who are you talking to?"

  A silver needle pierced his brain. "Montag, listen, only one way out, play it as a joke, cover up, pretend you aren't mad at all. Then--walk to your wall incinerator, and throw the book in!"

  Mildred had already anticipated this in a quavery voice. "Ladies, once a year, every fireman's allowed to bring one book home, from the old days, to show his family how silly it all was, how nervous that sort of thing can make you, how crazy. Guy's surprise tonight is to read you one sample to show how mixed up things were, so none of us will ever have to bother our little old heads about that junk again, isn't that right, darling?"

  He crushed the book in his fists.

  "Say 'yes.'"

  His mouth moved like Faber's:

  "Yes."

  Mildred snatched the book with a laugh. "Here! Read this one. No, I take it back. Here's that real funny one you read out loud today. Ladies, you won't understand a word. It goes umpty-tumpty-ump. Go ahead, Guy, that page, dear."

  He looked at the opened page.

  A fly stirred its wings softly in his ear. "Read."

  "What's the title, dear?"

  "Dover Beach." His mouth was numb.

  "Now read in a nice clear voice and go slow."

  The room was blazing hot, he was all fire, he was all coldness; they sat in the middle of an empty desert with three chairs and him standing, swaying, and him waiting for Mrs. Phelps to stop straightening her dress hem and Mrs. Bowles to take her fingers away from her hair. Then he began to read in a low, stumbling voice that grew firmer as he progressed from line to line, and his voice went out across the desert, into the whiteness, and around the three sitting women there in the great hot emptiness.

  The Sea of Faith

  Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

  Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

  But now I only hear

  Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

  Retreating, to the breath

  Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

  And naked shingles of the world.

  The chairs creaked under the three women.

  Montag finished it out:

  Ah, love, let us be true

  To one another! for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  Mrs. Phelps was crying.

  The others in the middle of the desert watched her crying grow very loud as her face squeezed itself out of shape. They sat, not touching her, bewildered with her display. She sobbed uncontrollably. Montag himself was stunned and shaken.

  "Sh, sh," said Mildred. "You're all right, Clara, now, Clara, snap out of it! Clara, what's wrong?"

  "I--I," sobbed Mrs. Phelps, "don't know, don't know, I just don't know, oh, oh. . . ."

  Mrs. Bowles stood up and glared at Montag. "You see? I knew it, that's what I wanted to prove! I knew it would happen! I've always said, poetry and tears, poetry and suicide and crying and awful feelings, poetry and sickness; all that mush! Now I've had it proved to me. You're nasty, Mr. Montag, you're nasty!"

  Faber said, "Now..."

  Montag felt himself turn and walk to the wall slot and drop the book in through the brass notch to the waiting flames.

  "Silly words, silly words, silly awful hurting words," said Mrs. Bowles. "Why do people want to hurt people? Not enough hurt in the world, you got to tease people with stuff like that!"

  "Clara, now, Clara," begged Mildred, pulling her arm. "Come on, let's be cheery, you turn the 'family' on, now. Go ahead. Let's laugh and be happy, now, stop crying, we'll have a party!"

  "No," said Mrs. Bowles. "I'm trotting right straight home. You want to visit my house and my 'family,' well and good. But I won't come in this fireman's crazy house again in my lifetime!"

  "Go home." Montag fixed his eyes upon her, quietly. "Go home and think of your first husband divorced and your second husband killed in a jet and your third husband blowing his brains out, go home and think of the dozen abortions you've had, go home and think of that and your damn Caesarean sections, too, and your children who hate your guts! Go home and think how it all happened and what did you ever do to stop it? Go home, go home!" he yelled. "Before I knock you down and kick you out the door!"

  Doors slammed and the house was empty. Montag stood alone in the winter weather, with the parlor walls the color of dirty snow.

  In the bathroom, water ran. He heard Mildred shake the sleeping tablets into her hand.

  "Fool, Montag, fool, fool, oh God you silly fool. . . ."

  "Shut up!" He pulled the green bullet from his ear and jammed it into his pocket.

  It sizzled faintly, ". . . fool ... fool. . . ."

  He searched the house and found the books where Mildred had stacked them behind the refrigerator. Some were missing and he knew that she had started on her own slow process of dispersing the dynamite in her house, stick by stick. But he was not angry now, only exhausted and bewildered with himself. He carried the books into the backyard and hid them in the bushes near the alley fence. For tonight only, he thought, in case she decides to do any more burning.

  He went back through the house. "Mildred?" He called at the door of the darkened bedroom. There was no sound.

  Outside, crossing t
he lawn, on his way to work, he tried not to see how completely dark and deserted Clarisse McClellan's house was. . . .

  On the way downtown he was so completely alone with his terrible error that he felt the necessity for the strange warmness and goodness that came from a familiar and gentle voice speaking in the night. Already, in a few short hours, it seemed that he had known Faber for a lifetime. Now, he knew that he was two people, that he was, above all, Montag who knew nothing, who did not even know himself a fool, but only suspected it. And he knew that he was also the old man who talked to him and talked to him as the train was sucked from one end of the night city to the other on one long sickening gasp of motion. In the days to follow, and in the nights when there was no moon and in the nights when there was a very bright moon shining on the earth, the old man would go on with this talking and this talking, drop by drop, stone by stone, flake by flake. His mind would well over at last and he would not be Montag any more, this the old man told him, assured him, promised him. He would be Montag-plus-Faber, fire plus water, and then, one day, after everything had mixed and simmered and worked away in silence, there would be neither fire nor water, but wine. Out of two separate and opposite things, a third. And one day he would look back upon the fool and know the fool. Even now he could feel the start of the long journey, the leave taking, the going away from the self he had been.

  It was good listening to the beetle hum, the sleepy mosquito buzz and delicate filigree murmur of the old man's voice at first scolding him and then consoling him in the late hour of night as he emerged from the steaming subway toward the firehouse world.

  "Pity, Montag, pity. Don't haggle and nag them; you were so recently of them yourself. They are so confident that they will run on forever. But they won't run on. They don't know that this is all one huge big blazing meteor that makes a pretty fire in space, but that some day it'll have to hit. They see only the blaze, the pretty fire, as you saw it.

  "Montag, old men who stay at home, afraid, tending their peanut-brittle bones, have no right to criticize. Yet you almost killed things at the start. Watch it! I'm with you, remember that. I understand how it happened. I must admit that your blind raging invigorated me. God, how young I felt! But now--I want you to feel old, I want a little of my cowardice to be distilled in you tonight. The next few hours, when you see Captain Beatty, tiptoe 'round him, let me hear him for you, let me feel the situation out. Survival is our ticket. Forget the poor, silly women. . . ."

  "I made them unhappier than they have been in years, I think," said Montag. "It shocked me to see Mrs. Phelps cry. Maybe they're right, maybe it's best not to face things, to run, have fun. I don't know. I feel guilty--"

  "No, you mustn't! If there were no war, if there was peace in the world, I'd say fine, have fun! But, Montag, you mustn't go back to being just a fireman. All isn't well with the world."

  Montag perspired.

  "Montag, you listening?"

  "My feet," said Montag. "I can't move them. I feel so damn silly. My feet won't move!"

  "Listen. Easy now," said the old man gently. "I know, I know. You're afraid of making mistakes. Don't be. Mistakes can be profited by. Man, when I was younger I shoved my ignorance in people's faces. They beat me with sticks. By the time I was forty my blunt instrument had been honed to a fine cutting point for me. If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn. Now, pick up your feet, into the firehouse with you! We're twins, we're not alone any more, we're not separated out in different parlors, with no contact between. If you need help when Beatty pries at you, I'll be sitting right here in your eardrum making notes!"

  Montag felt his right foot, then his left foot, move.

  "Old man," he said, "stay with me."

  The Mechanical Hound was gone. Its kennel was empty and the firehouse stood all about in plaster silence and the orange Salamander slept with its kerosene in its belly and the fire throwers crossed upon its flanks and Montag came in through the silence and touched the brass pole and slid up in the dark air, looking back at the deserted kennel, his heart beating, pausing, beating. Faber was a gray moth asleep in his ear, for the moment.

  Beatty stood near the drop hole waiting, but with his back turned as if he were not waiting.

  "Well," he said to the men playing cards, "here comes a very strange beast which in all tongues is called a fool."

  He put his hand to one side, palm up, for a gift. Montag put the book in it. Without even glancing at the title, Beatty tossed the book in the trash basket and lit a cigarette. "'Who are a little wise, the best fools be.' Welcome back, Montag. I hope you'll be staying with us, now that your fever is done and your sickness over. Sit in for a hand of poker?"

  They sat and the cards were dealt. In Beatty's sight, Montag felt the guilt of his hands. His fingers were like ferrets that had done some evil and now never rested, always stirred and picked and hid in pockets, moving from under Beatty's alcohol-flame stare. If Beatty so much as breathed on them, Montag felt that his hands might wither, turn over on their sides, and never be shocked to life again; they would be buried the rest of his life in his coat sleeves, forgotten. For these were the hands that had acted on their own, no part of him, here was where the conscience first manifested itself to snatch books, dart off with Job and Ruth and Willie Shakespeare, and now, in the firehouse, these hands seemed gloved with blood.

  Twice in half an hour, Montag had to rise from the game to go to the latrine to wash his hands. When he came back he hid his hands under the table.

  Beatty laughed. "Let's have your hands in sight, Montag. Not that we don't trust you, understand, but--"

  They all laughed.

  "Well," said Beatty, "the crisis is past and all is well, the sheep returns to the fold. We're all sheep who have strayed at times. Truth is truth, to the end of reckoning, we've cried. They are never alone that are accompanied with noble thoughts, we've shouted to ourselves. 'Sweet food of sweetly uttered knowledge,' Sir Philip Sidney said. But on the other hand: 'Words are like leaves and where they most abound, Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.' Alexander Pope. What do you think of that, Montag?"

  "I don't know."

  "Careful," whispered Faber, living in another world, far away.

  "Or this? 'A little learning is a dangerous thing. Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring; There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, and drinking largely sobers us again.' Pope. Same essay. Where does that put you?"

  Montag bit his lip.

  "I'll tell you," said Beatty, smiling at his cards. "That made you for a little while a drunkard. Read a few lines and off you go over the cliff. Bang, you're ready to blow up the world, chop off heads, knock down women and children, destroy authority. I know, I've been through it all."

  "I'm all right," said Montag, nervously.

  "Stop blushing. I'm not needling, really I'm not. Do you know, I had a dream an hour ago. I lay down for a catnap and in this dream you and I, Montag, got into a furious debate on books. You towered with rage, yelled quotes at me. I calmly parried every thrust. 'Tower,' I said. And you, quoting Dr. Johnson, said 'Knowledge is more than equivalent to force!' And I said, 'Well, Dr. Johnson also said, dear boy, that "He is no wise man that will quit a certainty for an uncertainty."' Stick with the firemen, Montag. All else is dreary chaos!"

  "Don't listen," whispered Faber. "He's trying to confuse. He's slippery. Watch out!"

  Beatty chuckled. "And you said, quoting, 'Truth will come to light, murder will not be hid long!' And I cried in good humor, 'Oh God, he speaks only of his horse!' And 'The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.' And you yelled, 'This age thinks better of a gilded fool, than of a threadbare saint in wisdom's school!' And I whispered gently, 'The dignity of truth is lost with much protesting.' And you screamed, 'Carcasses bleed at the sight of the murderer!' And I said, patting your hand, 'What, do I give you trench mouth?' And you shrieked, 'Knowledge is power!' and 'A dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees the furthest of the two!' and
I summed my side up with rare serenity in, 'The folly of mistaking a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself as an oracle, is inborn in us, Mr. Valery once said.' "

  Montag's head whirled sickeningly. He felt beaten unmercifully on brow, eyes, nose, lips, chin, on shoulders, on upflailing arms. He wanted to yell, "No! shut up, you're confusing things, stop it!" Beatty's graceful fingers thrust out to seize his wrist.

  "God, what a pulse! I've got you going, have I, Montag? Jesus God, your pulse sounds like the day after the war. Everything but sirens and bells! Shall I talk some more? I like your look of panic. Swahili, Indian, English Lit., I speak them all. A kind of excellent dumb discourse, Willie!"

  "Montag, hold on!" The moth brushed Montag's ear. "He's muddying the waters!"

  "Oh, you were scared silly," said Beatty, "for I was doing a terrible thing in using the very books you clung to, to rebut you on every hand, on every point! What traitors books can be! you think they're backing you up, and they turn on you. Others can use them, too, and there you are, lost in the middle of the moor, in a great welter of nouns and verbs and adjectives. And at the very end of my dream, along I came with the Salamander and said, 'Going my way?' And you got in and we drove back to the firehouse in beatific silence, all dwindled away to peace." Beatty let Montag's wrist go, let the hand slump limply on the table. "All's well that is well in the end."

  Silence. Montag sat like a carved white stone. The echo of the final hammer on his skull died slowly away into the black cavern where Faber waited for the echoes to subside. And then when the startled dust had settled down about Montag's mind, Faber began, softly, "All right, he's had his say. You must take it in. I'll say my say, too, in the next few hours. And you'll take it in. And you'll try to judge them and make your decision as to which way to jump, or fall. But I want it to be your decision, not mine, and not the Captain's. But remember that the Captain belongs to the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh, God, the terrible tyranny of the majority. We all have our harps to play. And it's up to you now to know with which ear you'll listen."

  Montag opened his mouth to answer Faber and was saved this error in the presence of others when the station bell rang. The alarm voice in the ceiling chanted. There was a tacking-tacking sound as the alarm report telephone-typed out the address across the room. Captain Beatty, his poker cards in one pink hand, walked with exaggerated slowness to the phone and ripped out the address when the report was finished. He glanced perfunctorily at it, and shoved it in his pocket. He came back and sat down. The others looked at him.