Fahrenheit 451 (9 page)

            "Let's see what this is," said Montag.

            He spoke the words haltingly and with a terrible selfconsciousness. He read a dozen pages here and there and came at last to this: "'It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break eggs at the smaller end."'

            Mildred sat across the hall from him. "What does it mean? It doesn't mean
anything!
The Captain was right!"

            "Here now," said Montag. "We'll start over again, at the beginning."

PART TWO:

THE SIEVE AND THE SAND

They read the long afternoon through, while the cold November rain fell from the sky upon the quiet house. They sat in the hall because the parlour was so empty and grey-looking without its walls lit with orange and yellow confetti and sky-rockets and women in gold-mesh dresses and men in black velvet pulling one-hundred-pound rabbits from silver hats. The parlour was dead and Mildred kept peering in at it with a blank expression as Montag paced the floor and came back and squatted down and read a page as many as ten times, aloud.

            "'We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over, so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.'"

            Montag sat listening to the rain.

            "Is that what it was in the girl next door? I've tried so hard to figure."

            "She's dead. Let's talk about someone alive, for goodness' sake."

            Montag did not look back at his wife as he went trembling along the hall to the kitchen, where he stood a long. time watching the rain hit the windows before he came back down the hall in the grey light, waiting for the tremble to subside.

            He opened another book.

            "'That favourite subject, Myself."'

            He squinted at the wall. "'The favourite subject, Myself."'

            "I understand
that
one," said Mildred.

            "But Clarisse's favourite subject wasn't herself. It was everyone else, and me. She was the first person in a good many years I've really liked. She was the first person I can remember who looked straight at me as if I counted." He lifted the two books. "These men have been dead a long time, but I know their words point, one way or another, to Clarisse."

            Outside the front door, in the rain, a faint scratching.

            Montag froze. He saw Mildred thrust herself back to the wall and gasp.

            "I shut it off."

            "Someone―the door―why doesn't the door-voice tell us--"

            Under the door-sill, a slow, probing sniff, an exhalation of electric steam.

            Mildred laughed. "It's only a dog, that's what! You want me to shoo him away?"

            "Stay where you are!"

            Silence. The cold rain falling. And the smell of blue electricity blowing under the locked door.

            "Let's get back to work," said Montag quietly.

            Mildred kicked at a book. "Books aren't people. You read and I look around, but there isn't
anybody!
"

            He stared at the parlour that was dead and grey as the waters of an ocean that might teem with life if they switched on the electronic sun.

            "Now," said Mildred, "my 'family' is people. They tell me things;
I
laugh,
they
laugh! And the colours!"

            "Yes, I know."

            "And besides, if Captain Beatty knew about those books―" She thought about it. Her face grew amazed and then horrified. "He might come and burn the house and the 'family.' That's awful! Think of our investment. Why should I read? What
for?
"

            "What for! Why!" said Montag. "I saw the damnedest snake in the world the other night. It was dead but it was alive. It could see but it couldn't see. You want to
see
that snake. It's at Emergency Hospital where they filed a report on all the junk the snake got out of you! Would you like to go and check their file? Maybe you'd look under Guy Montag or maybe under Fear or War. Would you like to go to that house that burnt last night? And rake ashes for the bones of the woman who set fire to her own house! What about Clarisse McClellan, where do we look for her? The morgue! Listen!"

            The bombers crossed the sky and crossed the sky over the house, gasping, murmuring, whistling like an immense, invisible fan, circling in emptiness.

            "Jesus God," said Montag. "Every hour so many damn things in the sky! How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn't someone want to talk about it? We've started and won two atomic wars since 1960. Is it because we're having so much fun at home we've forgotten the world? Is it because we're so rich and the rest of the world's so poor and we just don't care if they are? I've heard rumours; the world is starving, but we're well-fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we're hated so much? I've heard the rumours about hate, too, once in a long while, over the years. Do
you
know why?
I
don't, that's sure! Maybe the books can get us half out of the cave. They just
might
stop us from making the same damn insane mistakes! I don't hear those idiot bastards in your parlour talking about it. God, Millie, don't you
see?
An hour a day, two hours, with these books, and maybe . . ."

            The telephone rang. Mildred snatched the phone.

            "Ann!" She laughed. "Yes, the White Clown's on tonight!"

            Montag walked to the kitchen and threw the book down. "Montag," he said, "you're really stupid. Where do we go from here? Do we turn the books in, forget it?" He opened the book to read over Mildred's laughter.

            Poor Millie, he thought. Poor Montag, it's mud to you, too. But where do you get help, where do you find a teacher this late?

            Hold on. He shut his eyes. Yes, of course. Again he found himself thinking of the green park a year ago. The thought had been with him many times recently, but now he remembered how it was that day in the city park when he had seen that old man in the black suit hide something, quickly in his coat.

            . . . The old man leapt up as if to run. And Montag said, "Wait!"

            "I haven't done anything!" cried the old man trembling.

            "No one said you did."

            They had sat in the green soft light without saying a word for a moment, and then Montag talked about the weather, and then the old man responded with a pale voice. It was a strange quiet meeting. The old man admitted to being a retired English professor who had been thrown out upon the world forty years ago when the last liberal arts college shut for lack of students and patronage. His name was Faber, and when he finally lost his fear of Montag, he talked in a cadenced voice, looking at the sky and the trees and the green park, and when an hour had passed he said something to Montag and Montag sensed it was a rhymeless poem. Then the old man grew even more courageous and said something else and that was a poem, too. Faber held his hand over his left coat-pocket and spoke these words gently, and Montag knew if he reached out, he might pull a book of poetry from the man's coat. But he did not reach out. His. hands stayed on his knees, numbed and useless. "I don't talk things, sir," said Faber. "I talk the meaning of things. I sit here and know I'm alive."

            That was all there was to it, really. An hour of monologue, a poem, a comment, and then without even acknowledging the fact that Montag was a fireman, Faber with a certain trembling, wrote his address on a slip of paper. "For your file," he said, "in case you decide to be angry with me."

            "I'm not angry," Montag said, surprised.

            Mildred shrieked with laughter in the hall.

            Montag went to his bedroom closet and flipped through his file-wallet to the heading: FUTURE INVESTIGATIONS (?). Faber's name was there. He hadn't turned it in and he hadn't erased it.

            He dialled the call on a secondary phone. The phone on the far end of the line called Faber's name a dozen times before the professor answered in a faint voice. Montag identified himself and was met with a lengthy silence. "Yes, Mr. Montag?"

            "Professor Faber, I have a rather odd question to ask. How many copies of the Bible are left in this country?"

            "I don't know what you're talking about!"

            "I want to know if there are
any
copies left at all."

            "This is some sort of a trap! I can't talk to just
anyone
on the phone!"

            "How many copies of Shakespeare and Plato?"

            "None! You know as well as I do. None!"

            Faber hung up.

            Montag put down the phone. None. A thing he knew of course from the firehouse listings. But somehow he had wanted to hear it from Faber himself.

            In the hall Mildred's face was suffused with excitement. "Well, the ladies are coming over!"

            Montag showed her a book. "This is the Old and New Testament, and-"

            "Don't start that again!"

            "It might be the last copy in this part of the world."

            "You've got to hand it back tonight, don't you know? Captain Beatty
knows
you've got it, doesn't he?"

            "I don't think he knows
which
book I stole. But how do I choose a substitute? Do I turn in Mr. Jefferson? Mr. Thoreau? Which is least valuable? If I pick a substitute and Beatty does know which book I stole, he'll guess we've an entire library here!"

            Mildred's mouth twitched. "See what you're
doing?
You'll ruin us! Who's more important, me or that Bible?" She was beginning to shriek now, sitting there like a wax doll melting in its own heat.

            He could hear Beatty's voice. "Sit down, Montag. Watch. Delicately, like the petals of a flower. Light the first page, light the second page. Each becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page from the second and so on, chainsmoking, chapter by chapter, all the silly things the words mean, all the false promises, all the second-hand notions and time-worn philosophies." There sat Beatty, perspiring gently, the floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm. Mildred stopped screaming as quickly as she started. Montag was not listening. "There's only one thing to do," he said. "Some time before tonight when I give the book to Beatty, I've got to have a duplicate made."

            "You'll be here for the White Clown tonight, and the ladies coming over?" cried Mildred.

            Montag stopped at the door, with his back turned. "Millie?"

            A silence "What?"

            "Millie? Does the White Clown love you?"

            No answer.

            "Millie, does―" He licked his lips. "Does your 'family' love you, love you
very
much, love you with all their heart and soul, Millie?"

            He felt her blinking slowly at the back of his neck.

            "Why'd you ask a silly question like that?"

            He felt he wanted to cry, but nothing would happen to his eyes or his mouth.

            "If you see that dog outside," said Mildred, "give him a kick for me."

            He hesitated, listening at the door. He opened it and stepped out.

            The rain had stopped and the sun was setting in the clear sky. The street and the lawn and the porch were empty. He let his breath go in a great sigh.

            He slammed the door.

            He was on the subway.

            I'm numb, he thought. When did the numbness really begin in my face? In my body? The night I kicked the pill-bottle in the dark, like kicking a buried mine.

            The numbness will go away, he thought. It'll take time, but I'll do it, or Faber will do it for me. Someone somewhere will give me back the old face and the old hands the way they were. Even the smile, he thought, the old burnt-in smile, that's gone. I'm lost without it.

            The subway fled past him, cream-tile, jet-black, cream-tile, jet-black, numerals and darkness, more darkness and the total adding itself.

            Once as a child he had sat upon a yellow dune by the sea in the middle of the blue and hot summer day, trying to fill a sieve with sand, because some cruel cousin had said, "Fill this sieve and you'll get a dime!" And the faster he poured, the faster it sifted through with a hot whispering. His hands were tired, the sand was boiling, the sieve was empty. Seated there in the midst of July, without a sound, he felt the tears move down his cheeks.

            Now as the vacuum-underground rushed him through the dead cellars of town, jolting him, he remembered the terrible logic of that sieve, and he looked down and saw that he was carrying the Bible open. There were people in the suction train but he held the book in his hands and the silly thought came to him, if you read fast and read all, maybe some of the sand will stay in the sieve. But he read and the words fell through, and he thought, in a few hours, there will be Beatty, and here will be me handing this over, so no phrase must escape me, each line must be memorized. I will myself to do it.

            He clenched the book in his fists.

            Trumpets blared.

            "Denham's Dentrifice."

            Shut up, thought Montag. Consider the lilies of the field.

            "Denham's Dentifrice."

            They toil not―

            "Denham's―"

            Consider the lilies of the field, shut up, shut up.