Fahrenheit 451
PAGE 5
". . .one forty-five..." The voice-clock mourned out the cold hour of a cold morning of a still
colder year.
"What's wrong, Montag?"
Montag opened his eyes.
A radio hummed somewhere. "... war may be declared any hour. This country stands ready to
defend its--"
The firehouse trembled as a great flight of jet planes whistled a single note across the black
morning sky.
Montag blinked. Beatty was looking at him as if he were a museum statue. At any moment,
Beatty might rise and walk about him, touching, exploring his guilt and self-consciousness.
Guilt? What guilt was that?
"Your play, Montag."
Montag looked at these men whose faces were sunburnt by a thousand real and ten thousand
imaginary fires, whose work flushed their cheeks and fevered their eyes. These men who looked
steadily into their platinum igniter flames as they lit their eternally burning black pipes. They and
their charcoal hair and soot-coloured brows and bluish-ash-smeared cheeks where they had
shaven close; but their heritage showed. Montag started up, his mouth opened. Had he ever seen
a fireman that didn't have black hair, black brows, a fiery face, and a blue-steel shaved but
unshaved look? These men were all mirror-images of himself! Were all firemen picked then for
their looks as well as their proclivities? The colour of cinders and ash about them, and the
continual smell of burning from their pipes. Captain Beatty there, rising in thunderheads of
tobacco smoke. Beatty opening a fresh tobacco packet, crumpling the cellophane into a sound of
fire.
Montag looked at the cards in his own hands. "I-I've been thinking. About the fire last week.
About the man whose library we fixed. What happened to him?"
"They took him screaming off to the asylum"
"He. wasn't insane."
Beatty arranged his cards quietly. "Any man's insane who thinks he can fool the Government and
us." "
"I've tried to imagine," said Montag, "just how it would feel. I mean to have firemen burn our
houses and our books."
"We haven't any books."
"But if we did have some."
"You got some?"
Beatty blinked slowly.
"No." Montag gazed beyond them to the wall with the typed lists of a million forbidden books.
Their names leapt in fire, burning down the years under his axe and his hose which sprayed not
water but kerosene. "No. " But in his mind, a cool wind started up and blew out of the ventilator
grille at home, softly, softly, chilling his face. And, again, he saw himself in a green park talking
to an old man, a very old man, and the wind from the park was cold, too.
Montag hesitated, "Was-was it always like this? The firehouse, our work? I mean, well, once
upon a time..."
"Once upon a time!" Beatty said. "What kind of talk is THAT?"
Fool, thought Montag to himself, you'll give it away. At the last fire, a book of fairy tales, he'd
glanced at a single line. "I mean," he said, "in the old days, before homes were completely
fireproofed " Suddenly it seemed a much younger voice was speaking for him. He opened his
mouth and it was Clarisse McClellan saying, "Didn't firemen prevent fires rather than stoke them
up and get them going?"
"That's rich!" Stoneman and Black drew forth their rulebooks, which also contained brief
histories of the Firemen of America, and laid them out where Montag, though long familiar with
them, might read:
"Established, 1790, to burn English-influenced books in the Colonies. First Fireman: Benjamin
Franklin."
RULE 1 . Answer the alarm swiftly.
2. Start the fire swiftly.
3. Burn everything.
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.
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