PAGE 7
"Good night," she said.
He heard a faint rustle. Her hands moved. The electric thimble moved like a praying mantis on
the pillow, touched by her hand. Now it was in her ear again, humming.
He listened and his wife was singing under her breath.
Outside the house, a shadow moved, an autumn wind rose up and faded away But there was
something else in the silence that he heard. It was like a breath exhaled upon the window. It was
like a faint drift of greenish luminescent smoke, the motion of a single huge October leaf
blowing across the lawn and away.
The Hound, he thought. It's out there tonight. It's out there now. If I opened the window . . .
He did not open the window.
He had chills and fever in the morning.
"You can't be sick," said Mildred.
He closed his eyes over the hotness. "Yes."
"But you were all right last night."
"No, I wasn't all right " He heard the "relatives" shouting in the parlour.
Mildred stood over his bed, curiously. He felt her there, he saw her without opening his eyes, her
hair burnt by chemicals to a brittle straw, her eyes with a kind of cataract unseen but suspect far
behind the pupils, the reddened pouting lips, the body as thin as a praying mantis from dieting,
and her flesh like white bacon. He could remember her no other way.
"Will you bring me aspirin and water?"
"You've got to get up," she said. "It's noon. You've slept five hours later than usual."
"Will you turn the parlour off?" he asked.
"That's my family."
"Will you turn it off for a sick man?"
"I'll turn it down."
She went out of the room and did nothing to the parlour and came back. "Is that better?"
"Thanks."
"That's my favourite programme," she said.
"What about the aspirin?"
"You've never been sick before." She went away again.
"Well, I'm sick now. I'm not going to work tonight. Call Beatty for me."
"You acted funny last night." She returned, humming.
"Where's the aspirin?" He glanced at the water-glass she handed him.
"Oh." She walked to the bathroom again. "Did something happen?"
"Afire, is all."
"I had a nice evening," she said, in the bathroom.
"What doing?"
"The parlour."
"What was on?"
"Programmes."
"What programmes?"
"Some of the best ever."
"Who?".
"Oh, you know, the bunch."
"Yes, the bunch, the bunch, the bunch." He pressed at the pain in his eyes and suddenly the
odour of kerosene made him vomit.
Mildred came in, humming. She was surprised. "Why'd you do that?"
He looked with dismay at the floor. "We burned an old woman with her books."
"It's a good thing the rug's washable." She fetched a mop and worked on it. "I went to Helen's
last night."
"Couldn't you get the shows in your own parlour?"
"Sure, but it's nice visiting."
She went out into the parlour. He heard her singing.
"Mildred?" he called.
She returned, singing, snapping her fingers softly.
"Aren't you going to ask me about last night?" he said.
"What about it?"
"We burned a thousand books. We burned a woman."
"Well?"
The parlour was exploding with sound.
"We burned copies of Dante and Swift and Marcus Aurelius."
"Wasn't he a European?"
"Something like that."
"Wasn't he a radical?"
"I never read him."
"He was a radical." Mildred fiddled with the telephone. "You don't expect me to call Captain
Beatty, do you?"
"You must! "
"Don't shout!"
"I wasn't shouting." He was up in bed, suddenly, enraged and flushed, shaking. The parlour
roared in the hot air. "I can't call him. I can't tell him I'm sick."
"Why?"
Because you're afraid, he thought. A child feigning illness, afraid to call because after a
moment's discussion, the conversation would run so: "Yes, Captain, I feel better already. I'll be
in at ten o'clock tonight."
"You're not sick," said Mildred.
Montag fell back in bed. He reached under his pillow. The hidden book was still there.
"Mildred, how would it be if, well, maybe, I quit my job awhile?"
"You want to give up everything? After all these years of working, because, one night, some
woman and her books--"
"You should have seen her, Millie! "
"She's nothing to me; she shouldn't have had books. It was her responsibility, she should have
thought of that. I hate her. She's got you going and next thing you know we'll be out, no house,
no job, nothing."
"You weren't there, you didn't see," he said. "There must be something in books, things we can't
imagine, to make a woman stay in a burning house; there must be something there. You don't
stay for nothing."
"She was simple-minded."
"She was as rational as you and I, more so perhaps, and we burned her."
"That's water under the bridge."
"No, not water; fire. You ever seen a burned house? It smoulders for days. Well, this fire'll last
me the rest of my life. God! I've been trying to put it out, in my mind, all night. I'm crazy with
trying."
"You should have thought of that before becoming a fireman."
"Thought! " he said. "Was I given a choice? My grandfather and father were firemen. In my
sleep, I ran after them."
The parlour was playing a dance tune.
"This is the day you go on the early shift," said Mildred. "You should have gone two hours ago. I
just noticed."
"It's not just the woman that died," said Montag. "Last night I thought about all the kerosene I've
used in the past ten years. And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man
was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to
put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before." He got out of bed.
"It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking around at the
world and life, and then I came along in two minutes and boom! it's all over."
"Let me alone," said Mildred . "I didn't do anything."
"Let you alone! That's all very well, but how can I leave myself alone? We need not to be let
alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really
bothered? About something important, about something real?"
And then he shut up, for he remembered last week and the two white stones staring up at the
ceiling and the pump-snake with the probing eye and the two soap-faced men with the cigarettes
moving in their mouths when they talked. But that was another Mildred, that was a Mildred so
deep inside this one, and so bothered, really bothered, that the two women had never met. He
turned away.
Mildred said, "Well, now you've done it. Out front of the house. Look who's here.".
"I don't care."
"There's a Phoenix car just driven up and a man in a black shirt with an orange snake stitched on
his arm coming up the front walk."
"Captain Beauty?" he said,
"Captain Beatty."
Montag did not move, but stood looking into the cold whiteness of the wall immediately before
him.
"Go let him in, will you? Tell him I'm sick."
"Tell him yourself! " She ran a few steps this way, a few steps that, and stopped, eyes wide, when
the front door speaker called her name, softly, softly, Mrs. Montag, Mrs. Montag, someone here,
someone here, Mrs. Montag, Mrs. Montag, someone's here. Fading.
Montag made sure the book was well hidden behind the pillow, climbed slowly back into bed,
arranged the covers over his knees and across his chest, half-sitting, and after a while Mildred
moved and went out of the room and Captain Beatty strolled in, his hands in his pockets.
"Shut the 'relatives' up," said Beatty, looking around at everything except Montag and his wife.
This time, Mildred ran. The yammering voices stopped yelling in the parlour.
Captain Beatty sat down in the most comfortable chair with a peaceful look on his ruddy face.
He took time to prepare and light his brass pipe and puff out a great smoke cloud. "Just thought
I'd come by and see how the sick man is."
"How'd you guess?"
Beatty smiled his smile which showed the candy pinkness of his gums and the tiny candy
whiteness of his teeth. "I've seen it all. You were going to call for a night off."
Montag sat in bed.
"Well," said Beatty, "take the night off!" He examined his eternal matchbox, the lid of which
said GUARANTEED: ONE MILLION LIGHTS IN THIS IGNITER, and began to strike the
chemical match abstractedly, blow out, strike, blow out, strike, speak a few words, blow out. He
looked at the flame. He blew, he looked at the smoke. "When will you be well?"
"Tomorrow. The next day maybe. First of the week."
Beatty puffed his pipe. "Every fireman, sooner or later, hits this. They only need understanding,
to know how the wheels run. Need to know the history of our profession. They don't feed it to
rookies like they used to. Damn shame." Puff. "Only fire chiefs remember it now." Puff. "I'll let
you in on it."
Mildred fidgeted.
Beatty took a full minute to settle himself in and think back for what he wanted to say.
"When did it all start, you ask, this job of ours, how did it come about, where, when? Well, I'd
say it really got started around about a thing called the Civil War. Even though our rule-book
claims it was founded earlier. The fact is we didn't get along well until photography came into its
own. Then�motion pictures in the early twentieth century. Radio. Television. Things began to
have mass."
Montag sat in bed, not moving.
"And because they had mass, they became simpler," said Beatty. "Once, books appealed to a few
people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But
then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple population.
Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you
follow me?"
"I think so."
Beatty peered at the smoke pattern he had put out on the air. "Picture it. Nineteenth-century man
with his horses, dogs, carts, slow motion. Then, in the twentieth century, speed up your camera.
Books cut shorter. Condensations, Digests. Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap
ending."
"Snap ending." Mildred nodded.
"Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column,
winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The
dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you
know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumour of a title to you, Mrs.
Montag) whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that
claimed: 'now at least you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbours.' Do you see?
Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for
the past five centuries or more."
Mildred arose and began to move around the room, picking things up and putting them down.
Beatty ignored her and continued
"Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click? Pic? Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace,
Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing,
Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a
headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man's mind around about so fast under the
pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters, that the centrifuge flings off all
unnecessary, time-wasting thought!"
Mildred smoothed the bedclothes. Montag felt his heart jump and jump again as she patted his
pillow. Right now she was pulling at his shoulder to try to get him to move so she could take the
pillow out and fix it nicely and put it back.
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