Fahrenheit 451
PAGE 15
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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 of 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.
"It can wait exactly forty seconds while I take all the money away from you," said Beatty,
happily.
Montag put his cards down.
"Tired, Montag? Going out of this game?"
"Yes."
"Hold on. Well, come to think of it, we can finish this hand later. Just leave your cards face down
and hustle the equipment. On the double now." And Beatty rose up again. "Montag, you don't
look well? I'd hate to think you were coming down with another fever..."
"I'll be all right."
"You'll be fine. This is a special case. Come on, jump for it!"
They leaped into the air and clutched the brass pole as if it were the last vantage point above a
tidal wave passing below, and then the brass pole, to their dismay slid them down into darkness,
into the blast and cough and suction of the gaseous dragon roaring to life!
"Hey !"
They rounded a corner in thunder and siren, with concussion of tyres, with scream of rubber,
with a shift of kerosene bulk in the glittery brass tank, like the food in the stomach of a giant;
with Montag's fingers jolting off the silver rail, swinging into cold space, with the wind tearing
his hair back from his head, with the wind whistling in his teeth, and him all the while thinking
of the women, the chaff women in his parlour tonight, with the kernels blown out from under
them by a neon wind, and his silly damned reading of a book to them. How like trying to put out
fires with water-pistols, how senseless and insane. One rage turned in for another. One anger
displacing another. When would he stop being entirely mad and be quiet, be very quiet indeed?
"Here we go!"
Montag looked up. Beatty never drove, but he was driving tonight, slamming the Salamander
around corners, leaning forward high on the driver's throne, his massive black slicker flapping
out behind so that he seemed a great black bat flying above the engine, over the brass numbers,
taking the full wind.
"Here we go to keep the world happy, Montag !"
Beatty's pink, phosphorescent cheeks glimmered in the high darkness, and he was smiling
furiously.
"Here we are!"
The Salamander boomed to a halt, throwing men off in slips and clumsy hops. Montag stood
fixing his raw eyes to the cold bright rail under his clenched fingers.
I can't do it, he thought. How can I go at this new assignment, how can I go on burning things? I
can't go in this place.
Beatty, smelling of the wind through which he had rushed, was at Montag's elbow. "All right,
Montag?"
The men ran like cripples in their clumsy boots, as quietly as spiders.
At last Montag raised his eyes and turned. Beatty was watching his face.
"Something the matter, Montag?"
"Why," said Montag slowly, "we've stopped in front of my house."
PART III
BURNING BRIGHT
LIGHTS flicked on and house-doors opened all down the street, to watch the carnival set up.
Montag and Beatty stared, one with dry satisfaction, the other with disbelief, at the house before
them, this main ring in which torches would be juggled and fire eaten.
"Well," said Beatty, "now you did it. Old Montag wanted to fly near the sun and now that he's
burnt his damn wings, he wonders why. Didn't I hint enough when I sent the Hound around your
place?"
Montag's face was entirely numb and featureless; he felt his head turn like a stone carving to the
dark place next door, set in its bright borders of flowers.
Beatty snorted. "Oh, no! You weren't fooled by that little idiot's routine, now, were you?
Flowers, butterflies, leaves, sunsets, oh, hell! It's all in her file. I'll be damned. I've hit the
bullseye. Look at the sick look on your face. A few grass-blades and the quarters of the moon.
What trash. What good did she ever do with all that?"
Montag sat on the cold fender of the Dragon, moving his head half an inch to the left, half an
inch to the right, left, right, left right, left ....
"She saw everything. She didn't do anything to anyone. She just let them alone."
"Alone, hell ! She chewed around you, didn't she? One of those damn do-gooders with their
shocked, holier-than-thou silences, their one talent making others feel guilty. God damn, they
rise like the midnight sun to sweat you in your bed!"
The front door opened; Mildred came down the steps, running, one suitcase held with a dream-
like clenching rigidity in her fist, as a beetle-taxi hissed to the curb.
"Mildred! "
She ran past with her body stiff, her face floured with powder, her mouth gone, without lipstick.
"Mildred, you didn't put in the alarm!"
She shoved the valise in the waiting beetle, climbed in, and sat mumbling, "Poor family, poor
family, oh everything gone, everything, everything gone now ...."
Beatty grabbed Montag's shoulder as the beetle blasted away and hit seventy miles an hour, far
down the street, gone.
There was a crash like the falling parts of a dream fashioned out of warped glass, mirrors, and
crystal prisms. Montag drifted about as if still another incomprehensible storm had turned him, to
see Stoneman and Black wielding axes, shattering window-panes to provide cross-ventilation.
The brush of a death's-head moth against a cold black screen. "Montag, this is Faber. Do you
hear me? What is happening
"This is happening to me," said Montag.
"What a dreadful surprise," said Beatty. "For everyone nowadays knows, absolutely is certain,
that nothing will ever happen to me. Others die, I go on. There are no consequences and no
responsibilities. Except that there are. But let's not talk about them, eh? By the time the
consequences catch up with you, it's too late, isn't it, Montag?"
"Montag, can you get away, run?" asked Faber.
Montag walked but did not feel his feet touch the cement and then the night grasses. Beatty
flicked his igniter nearby and the small orange flame drew his fascinated gaze.
"What is there about fire that's so lovely? No matter what age we are, what draws us to it?"
Beatty blew out the flame and lit it again. "It's perpetual motion; the thing man wanted to invent
but never did. Or almost perpetual motion. If you let it go on, it'd burn our lifetimes out. What is
fire? It's a mystery. Scientists give us gobbledegook about friction and molecules. But they don't
really know. Its real beauty is that it destroys responsibility and consequences. A problem gets
too burdensome, then into the furnace with it. Now, Montag, you're a burden. And fire will lift
you off my shoulders, clean, quick, sure; nothing to rot later. Antibiotic, aesthetic, practical."
Montag stood looking in now at this queer house, made strange by the hour of the night, by
murmuring neighbour voices, by littered glass, and there on the floor, their covers torn off and
spilled out like swan-feathers, the incredible books that looked so silly and really not worth
bothering with, for these were nothing but black type and yellowed paper, and ravelled binding.
Mildred, of course. She must have watched him hide the books in the garden and brought them
back in. Mildred. Mildred.
"I want you to do this job all by your lonesome, Montag. Not with kerosene and a match, but
piecework, with a flamethrower. Your house, your clean-up."
"Montag, can't you run, get away!"
"No!" cried Montag helplessly. "The Hound! Because of the Hound!"
Faber heard, and Beatty, thinking it was meant for him, heard. "Yes, the Hound's somewhere
about the neighbourhood, so don't try anything. Ready?"
"Ready." Montag snapped the safety-catch on the flamethrower.
"Fire!"
A great nuzzling gout of flame leapt out to lap at the books and knock them against the wall. He
stepped into the bedroom and fired twice and the twin beds went up in a great simmering
whisper, with more heat and passion and light than he would have supposed them to contain. He
burnt the bedroom walls and the cosmetics chest because he wanted to change everything, the
chairs, the tables, and in the dining-room the silverware and plastic dishes, everything that
showed that he had lived here in this empty house with a strange woman who would forget him
tomorrow, who had gone and quite forgotten him already, listening to her Seashell radio pour in
on her and in on her as she rode across town, alone. And as before, it was good to burn, he felt
himself gush out in the fire, snatch, rend, rip in half with flame, and put away the senseless
problem. If there was no solution, well then now there was no problem, either. Fire was best for
everything!
"The books, Montag!"
The books leapt and danced like roasted birds, their wings ablaze with red and yellow feathers.
And then he came to the parlour where the great idiot monsters lay asleep with their white
thoughts and their snowy dreams. And he shot a bolt at each of the three blank walls and the
vacuum hissed out at him. The emptiness made an even emptier whistle, a senseless scream. He
tried to think about the vacuum upon which the nothingness had performed, but he could not. He
held his breath so the vacuum could not get into his lungs. He cut off its terrible emptiness, drew
back, and gave the entire room a gift of one huge bright yellow flower of burning. The fire-proof
plastic sheath on everything was cut wide and the house began to shudder with flame.
"When you're quite finished," said Beatty behind him. "You're under arrest."
The house fell in red coals and black ash. It bedded itself down in sleepy pink-grey cinders and a
smoke plume blew over it, rising and waving slowly back and forth in the sky. It was three-thirty
in the morning. The crowd drew back into the houses; the great tents of the circus had slumped
into charcoal and rubble and the show was well over.
Montag stood with the flame-thrower in his limp hands, great islands of perspiration drenching
his armpits, his face smeared with soot. The other firemen waited behind him, in the darkness,
their faces illuminated faintly by the smouldering foundation.
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