Fahrenheit 451 (5 page)

                        4. Report back to firehouse immediately.

                        5. Stand alert for other alarms.

            Everyone watched Montag. He did not move.

            The alarm sounded.

            The bell in the ceiling kicked itself two hundred times. Suddenly there were four empty chairs. The cards fell in a flurry of snow. The brass pole shivered. The men were gone.

            Montag sat in his chair. Below, the orange dragon coughed into life.

            Montag slid down the pole like a man in a dream.

            The Mechanical Hound leapt up in its kennel, its eyes all green flame.

            "Montag, you forgot your helmet!"

            He seized it off the wall behind him, ran, leapt, and they were off, the night wind hammering about their siren scream and their mighty metal thunder!

            It was a flaking three-storey house in the ancient part of the city, a century old if it was a day, but like all houses it had been given a thin fireproof plastic sheath many years ago, and this preservative shell seemed to be the only thing holding it in the sky.

            "Here we are!"

            The engine slammed to a stop. Beatty, Stoneman, and Black ran up the sidewalk, suddenly odious and fat in the plump fireproof slickers. Montag followed.

            They crashed the front door and grabbed at a woman, though she was not running, she was not trying to escape. She was only standing, weaving from side to side, her eyes fixed upon a nothingness in the wall as if they had struck her a terrible blow upon the head. Her tongue was moving in her mouth, and her eyes seemed to be trying to remember something, and then they remembered and her tongue moved again: "'Play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out.' "

            "Enough of that!" said Beatty. "Where are they?"

            He slapped her face with amazing objectivity and repeated the question. The old woman's eyes came to a focus upon Beatty. "You know where they are or you wouldn't be here," she said.

            Stoneman held out the telephone alarm card with the complaint signed in telephone duplicate on the back "Have reason to suspect attic; 11 No. Elm, City. ―E. B."

            "That would be Mrs. Blake, my neighbour;" said the woman, reading the initials.

            "All right, men, let's get 'em!"

            Next thing they were up in musty blackness, swinging silver hatchets at doors that were, after all, unlocked, tumbling through like boys all rollick and shout. "Hey!" A fountain of books sprang down upon Montag as he climbed shuddering up the sheer stair-well. How inconvenient! Always before it had been like snuffing a candle. The police went first and adhesive-taped the victim's mouth and bandaged him off into their glittering beetle cars, so when you arrived you found an empty house. You weren't hurting anyone, you were hurting only
things!
And since things really couldn't be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don't scream or whimper, as this woman might begin to scream and cry out, there was nothing to tease your conscience later. You were simply cleaning up. Janitorial work, essentially. Everything to its proper place. Quick with the kerosene! Who's got a match!

            But now, tonight, someone had slipped. This woman was spoiling the ritual. The men were making too much noise, laughing, joking to cover her terrible accusing silence below. She made the empty rooms roar with accusation and shake down a fine dust of guilt that was sucked in their nostrils as they plunged about. It was neither cricket nor correct. Montag felt an immense irritation. She shouldn't be here, on top of everything!

            Books bombarded his shoulders, his arms, his upturned face A book alighted, almost obediently, like a white pigeon, in his hands, wings fluttering. In the dim, wavering light, a page hung. open and it was like a snowy feather, the words delicately painted thereon. In all the rush and fervour, Montag had only an instant to read a line, but it blazed in his mind for the next minute as if stamped there with fiery steel. "Time has fallen asleep in the afternoon sunshine." He dropped the book. Immediately, another fell into his arms.

            "Montag, up here!"

            Montag's hand closed like a mouth, crushed the book with wild devotion, with an insanity of mindlessness to his chest. The men above were hurling shovelfuls of magazines into the dusty air. They fell like slaughtered birds and the woman stood below, like a small girl, among the bodies.

            Montag had done nothing. His hand had done it all, his hand, with a brain of its own, with a conscience and a curiosity in each trembling finger, had turned thief.. Now, it plunged the book back under his arm, pressed it tight to sweating armpit, rushed out empty, with a magician's flourish! Look here! Innocent! Look!

            He gazed, shaken, at that white hand. He held it way out, as if he were far-sighted. He held it close, as if he were blind.

            "Montag!"

            He jerked about.

            "Don't stand there, idiot!"

            The books lay like great mounds of fishes left to dry. The men danced and slipped and fell over them. Titles glittered their golden eyes, falling, gone.

            "Kerosene! They pumped the cold fluid from the numbered 451 tanks strapped to their shoulders. They coated each book, they pumped rooms full of it.

            They hurried downstairs, Montag staggered after them in the kerosene fumes.

            "Come on, woman!"

            The woman knelt among the books, touching the drenched leather and cardboard, reading the gilt titles with her fingers while her eyes accused Montag.

            "You can't ever have my books," she said.

            "You know the law," said Beatty. "Where's your common sense? None of those books agree with each other. You've been locked up here for years with a regular damned Tower of Babel. Snap out of it! The people in those books never lived. Come on now!"

            She shook her head.

            "The whole house is going up;" said Beatty, The men walked clumsily to the door. They glanced back at Montag, who stood near the woman.

            "You're not leaving her here?" he protested.

            "She won't come."

            "Force her, then!"

            Beatty raised his hand in which was concealed the igniter. "We're due back at the house. Besides, these fanatics always try suicide; the pattern's familiar."

            Montag placed his hand on the woman's elbow. "You can come with me."

            "No," she said. "Thank you, anyway."

            "I'm counting to ten," said Beatty. "One. Two."

            "Please," said Montag.

            "Go on," said the woman.

            "Three. Four."

            "Here." Montag pulled at the woman.

            The woman replied quietly, "I want to stay here"

            "Five. Six."

            "You can stop counting," she said. She opened the fingers of one hand slightly and in the palm of the hand was a single slender object.

            An ordinary kitchen match.

            The sight of it rushed the men out and down away from the house. Captain Beatty, keeping his dignity, backed slowly through the front door, his pink face burnt and shiny from a thousand fires and night excitements. God, thought Montag, how true! Always at night the alarm comes. Never by day! Is it because the fire is prettier by night? More spectacle, a better show? The pink face of Beatty now showed the faintest panic in the door. The woman's hand twitched on the single matchstick. The fumes of kerosene bloomed up about her. Montag felt the hidden book pound like a heart against his chest.

            "Go on," said the woman, and Montag felt himself back away and away out of the door, after Beatty, down the steps, across the lawn, where the path of kerosene lay like the track of some evil snail.

            On the front porch where she had come to weigh them quietly with her eyes, her quietness a condemnation, the woman stood motionless.

            Beatty flicked his fingers to spark the kerosene.

            He was too late. Montag gasped.

            The woman on the porch reached out with contempt for them all, and struck the kitchen match against the railing.

            People ran out of houses all down the street.

            They said nothing on their way back to the firehouse. Nobody looked at anyone else. Montag sat in the front seat with Beatty and Black. They did not even smoke their pipes. They sat there looking out of the front of the great salamander as they turned a corner and went silently on.

            "Master Ridley," said Montag at last.

            "What?" said Beatty.

            "She said, 'Master Ridley.' She said some crazy thing when we came in the door. 'Play the man,' she said, 'Master Ridley.' Something, something, something."

            "'We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out,"' said Beatty. Stoneman glanced over at the Captain, as did Montag, startled.

            Beatty rubbed his chin. "A man named Latimer said that to a man named Nicholas Ridley, as they were being burnt alive at Oxford, for heresy, on October 16, 1555."

            Montag and Stoneman went back to looking at the street as it moved under the engine wheels.

            "I'm full of bits and pieces," said Beatty. "Most fire captains have to be. Sometimes I surprise myself.
Watch
it, Stoneman!"

            Stoneman braked the truck.

            "Damn!" said Beatty. "You've gone right by the corner where we turn for the firehouse."

            "Who is it?"

            "Who would it be?" said Montag, leaning back against the closed door in the dark.

            His wife said, at last, "Well, put on the light."

            "I don't want the light."

            "Come to bed."

            He heard her roll impatiently; the bedsprings squealed.

            "Are you drunk?" she said.

            So it was the hand that started it all. He felt one hand and then the other work his coat free and let it slump to the floor. He held his pants out into an abyss and let them fall into darkness. His hands had been infected, and soon it would be his arms. He could feel the poison working up his wrists and into his elbows and his shoulders, and then the jump-over from shoulder-blade to shoulder-blade like a spark leaping a gap. His hands were ravenous. And his eyes were beginning to feel hunger, as if they must look at something, anything, everything.

            His wife said, "What
are
you doing?"

            He balanced in space with the book in his sweating cold fingers.

            A minute later she said, "Well, just don't stand there in the middle of the floor."

            He made a small sound.

            "What?" she asked.

            He made more soft sounds. He stumbled towards the bed and shoved the book clumsily under the cold pillow. He fell into bed and his wife cried out, startled. He lay far across the room from her, on a winter island separated by an empty sea. She talked to him for what seemed a long while and she talked about this and she talked about that and it was only words, like the words he had heard once in a nursery at a friend's house, a two-year-old child building word patterns, talking jargon, making pretty sounds in the air. But Montag said nothing and after a long while when he only made the small sounds, he felt her move in the room and come to his bed and stand over him and put her hand down to feel his cheek. He knew that when she pulled her hand away from his face it was wet.

            Late in the night he looked over at Mildred. She was awake. There was a tiny dance of melody in the air, her Seashell was tamped in her ear again and she was listening to far people in far places, her eyes wide and staring at the fathoms of blackness above her in the ceiling.

            Wasn't there an old joke about the wife who talked so much on the telephone that her desperate husband ran out to the nearest store and telephoned her to ask what was for dinner? Well, then, why didn't he buy himself an audio-Seashell broadcasting station and talk to his wife late at night, murmur, whisper, shout, scream, yell? But what would he whisper, what would he yell? What could he say?

            And suddenly she was so strange he couldn't believe he knew her at all. He was in someone else's house, like those other jokes people told of the gentleman, drunk, coming home late at night, unlocking the wrong door, entering a wrong room, and bedding with a stranger and getting up early and going to work and neither of them the wiser.

            "Millie. . . .?" he whispered.

            "What?"

            "I didn't mean to startle you. What I want to know is. . . ."

            "Well?"

            "When did we meet. And
where?
"

            "When did we meet for
what?
" she asked.

            "I meanoriginally."

            He knew she must be frowning in the dark.

            He clarified it. "The first time we ever met, where was it, and when?"

            "Why, it was at ―"

            She stopped.

            "I don't know," she said.

            He was cold. "Can't you remember?"

            "It's been so long."

            "Only ten years, that's all, only ten!"

            "Don't get excited, I'm trying to think." She laughed an odd little laugh that went up and up. "Funny, how funny, not to remember where or when you met your husband or wife."

            He lay massaging his eyes, his brow, and the back of his neck, slowly. He held both hands over his eyes and applied a steady pressure there as if to crush memory into place. It was suddenly more important than any other thing in a life-time that he knew where he had met Mildred.