The Fireman (7 page)

"Don't you worry about the war?"

"Well, heavens, if there is one, it's got to be over with. We can't just sit and worry, can we?"

"No, but we can think about it?'

'"I'll let Dick think of it." A nervous giggle.

"And die maybe."

"It's always someone else's husband dies, isn't that the joke?" The women all tittered.

Yes, thought Montag, and even if Dick does die, what does it matter? We've learned the magic of the replaceable part from machines. You can't tell one man from another these days. And women, like so many plastic dolls —

Everyone was silent, like children with a schoolmaster.

"Did you see the Clarence Dove film last night?" said Mildred, suddenly.

"He's hilarious."

"But what if Dick should die, or your husband, Mrs. Phelps?" Montag insisted.

"He's dead. He died a week ago. Didn't you know? He jumped from the tenth floor of the State Hotel."

"I didn't know." Montag fell silent, embarrassed.

"But to get back to Clarence Dove..." said Mildred.

"Wait a minute," said Montag, angrily. "Mrs. Phelps, why did you marry your husband? What did you have in common?"

The woman waved her hands helplessly. "Why, he had such a nice sense of humor, and we liked the same t-v shows and — "

"Did you have any children?"

"Don't be ridiculous."

"Come to think of it, no one here has children," said Montag. "Except Mrs. Bowles."

"Four, by Caesarian section. It's easy that way."

"The Caesarians weren't necessary?"

"I always said I'd be damned if I'd go through all that agony just for a baby. Four Caesarians. Nothing to it, really."

Yes, everything easy. Montag clenched his teeth. To mistake the easy way for the right way, how delicious a temptation. But it wasn't living. A woman who wouldn't bear, or a shiftless man didn't belong; they were passing through. They belonged to nothing and did nothing.

"Have you ever thought, ladies," he said, growing more contemptuous of them by the moment, "that perhaps this isn't the best of all possible worlds? That perhaps our civil rights and other precious possessions haven't been taken away in the past century, but have, if anything, been given away by us?"

"Why, that can't be true! We'd have heard about it."

"ON THAT pap-dispenser?" cried Montag, jerking his hand at the t-v. Suddenly he shoved his hand in his pocket and drew forth a piece of printed paper. He was shaking with rage and irritation and he was half blind, staring down at the twitching sheet before his eyes.

"What's that?" Mrs. Masterson squinted.

"A poem I tore from a book."

"I don't like poetry."

"Have you ever heard any?"

Mildred jumped up, but Montag said, coldly, "Sit down." The women all lit cigarets nervously, twisting their red mouths.

"This is illegal, isn't it?" squealed Mrs. Phelps. "I'm afraid. I'm going home."

"Sit down and shut up," said Montag.

The room was quiet.

"This is a poem by a man named Matthew Arnold," said Montag. "Its title is Dover Beach."

The women were all glancing with expectation at the television set, as if it might save them from this moment.

Montag cleared his throat. He waited. He wanted very much to speak the poem right, and he was afraid that he might stumble. He read.

His voice rose and fell in the silent room and he found his way through to the final verses of the poem:

"
The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.
"

The four women twisted in their chairs.

Montag finished it out:

"
Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night
."

Montag let the white piece of paper fall slowly to the floor. The women watched it flutter and settle.

Mildred said, "Can I turn the t-v on now?"

"No, God damn it, no!"

Mildred sat down.

Mrs. Masterson said, "I don't get it. The poem, I mean."

"What was it about?" asked Mrs. Phelps, her eyes darting fearfully in flashes of white and dark.

"Don't you see?" shouted Montag.

"Nothing to get upset about," said Mrs. Masterson, casually.

"But it is, it is."

"Just silly words," said Mrs. Masterson. "But, Mr. Montag, I don't mind telling you — it is only because you're a fireman that we haven't called in an alarm on you for reading this to us. It's illegal. But it's also very silly. It was nonsense." She got to her feet and mashed out her cigaret. "Ladies, don't you think it's time for us to leave?"

"I don't want to come back here, ever," said Mrs. Phelps, hurrying for the door.

"Please stay!" cried Mildred.

The door slammed.

"Go home and think of your first husband, Mrs. Masterson, in the insane asylum, and of Mr. Phelps jumping off a building!" yelled Montag through the shut door.

The house was completely abandoned. He stood alone.

In the bathroom, water was running. He heard Mildred shaking the sleeping tablets out into her palm.

"You fool," he said to himself. "You idiot. Now you've done it. Now you've ruined it all, you and your poem, you and your righteous indignation."

He went into the kitchen and found the books where Mildred had stacked them behind the refrigerator. He carried a selection of them into the back yard, hid them in the weeds near the fence. "Just in case," he thought, "Mildred gets a passion for burning things during the night. The best books out here; the others in the house don't matter."

He went back through the house. "Mildred?" he called at the bedroom door but there was no sound.

He shut the front door quietly and left for work.

"THANK you, Montag." Mr. Leahy accepted the copy of the Bible and, without even looking at it, dropped it into the wall incinerator. "Let's forget all about it. Glad to see you back, Montag."

They walked upstairs.

They sat and played cards at one minute after midnight.

In Leahy's sight, Montag felt the guilt of his hands. His fingers were like ferrets that had done some evil deed, and now were never at rest, always stirring and picking and hiding in pockets, or moving out from under Leahy's alcohol-flame gaze. If Leahy so much as breathed on them, Montag felt that they might wither upon his wrists and die and he might never shake them to life again; they would be buried forever in his coat sleeves, forgotten.

For these were the hands that had acted on their own, that were no part of him, that were his swift and clever conscience, that snatched books, tore pages, hid paragraphs and sentences in little wads to be opened later, at home, by match-light, read and burned.

They were the hands that in the last year had darted off with Shakespeare and Job and Ruth and shelved them away next his crashing heart, over the throbbing ribs and the hot, roaring blood of a man excited by his theft, appalled by his temerity, betrayed by ten fingers which at times he held up to watch as if they were gloved with blood.

The game proceeded. Twice in half an hour, Montag got up and went to the latrine to wash his hands. He came back. He sat down. He held his cards. Leahy watched his fingers fumble the cards.

"Not smoking, Montag?"

"I've a cigaret cough."

And then, of course, the smoke reminded him of old men and old women screaming and falling into wild cinders, and it was not good any more to hold fire in your hand.

He put his hands under the table. "Let's have your hands in sight," said Leahy, casually. "Not that we don't trust you."

They all laughed.

The phone rang.

MR. LEAHY, carrying his cards in one pink hand, walked slowly over and stood by the phone, let it ring twice more, and then picked it up.

"Yes?"

Mr. Montag listened, eyes shut.

The clock ticked in the room.

"I see," said Leahy. He looked at Montag. He smiled. He winked. Montag glanced away. "Better give me that address again."

Mr. Montag got up. He walked around the room, hands in pockets. The other two men were standing ready. Leahy jerked his head "toward their coats, as if to say, "On the double!" They shoved their arms in their coats and pushed on their helmets, joking in whispers.

Mr. Montag waited.

"I understand perfectly," said Leahy into the phone. "Yes. Yes. Perfectly. No, that's all right. Don't you worry. We'll be right out."

Leahy deposited the receiver. "Well, well."

"A call? Books to be burned?"

"So it seems."

Mr. Montag sat down heavily. "I don't feel well."

"What a shame; this is a special case," said Leahy, coming forward slowly, putting on his slicker.

"I think I'm handing in my resignation."

"Not yet, Montag. One more fire, eh? Then I'll be agreeable; you can hand in your papers. We'll all be happy."

"Do you mean that?"

"Have I ever lied to you?"

Leahy fetched a helmet. "Put this on. The job'll be over in an hour. I understand you, Montag, really I do. Everything will be just as you want it."

"All right."

They slid down the brass pole.

"Where's the fire?"

"I'll drive!" shouted Leahy. "I've got the address."

The engine blasted to life and in the gaseous tornado they all leaped aboard.

THEY rounded a corner in thunder and siren, with concussion of tires, 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 Mr. Montag's fingers jolting off the silver rail, swinging into cold space, with the wind tearing his hair back from his bleak face, with the wind whistling in his teeth, and he all the while thinking of the women, the chaff women, with the kernels blown out from under them by a neon wind, and his reading a book to them.

What a silly thing it was now! For what was a book? Sheets of paper, lines of type. Why should he fret for books — one, two, or ten thousand of them, really? He was the only inhabitant of a burning world that cared, so why not drop it all, forget it, let the now-meaningless books lie?

"Here we go!" shouted Leahy.

"Elm Street?"

"Right!"

He saw Leahy up on his driver's throne, with his massive black slicker flapping out behind. He seemed to be an immense black bat flying above the engine, over the brass numbers, taking the wind. His pink, phosphorescent face glimmered in the high darkness, pressing forward, and he was smiling furiously.

"Here we go to keep the world happy!"

And Mr. Montag thought, "No, I can't let the books rot; I can't let them burn. As long as there are souls like Leahy, I can't hold my breath. But what can I do? I can't kill everyone. It's me against the world, and the odds too big for any man. What can I do? Against fire, what water is best?"