A Pleasure to Burn (34 page)

“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 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 TV 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?” said 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's 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 cigarette. “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.

 

“T
HANK YOU
, M
ONTAG
.”
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 to 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 cigarette 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.

 

M
R
. L
EAHY, 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.

 

T
HEY 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 the 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 one man. What can I do? Against fire, what water is best?”

“Now over on Park Terrace!”

The fire engine boomed to a halt, throwing the men off in skips and clumsy hops. Mr. Montag stood fixing his raw eyes to the cold bright rail under his gripped fingers.

“I can't do it,” he murmured. “I can't go in there. I can't rip another book.”

Leahy jumped from his throne, smelling of the wind that had hammered him about. “Okay, Montag, fetch the kerosene!”

The hoses were snaked out. The men ran on soft boots, as clumsy as cripples, as quiet as deadly black spiders.

Mr. Montag turned his head.

“What's wrong, Montag?” Leahy asked, solicitously.

“Why,” protested Montag, “that is
my
house.”

“So it is,” agreed Leahy, heartily.

All the lights were lit. Down the street, more lights were flicking on, people were standing on porches, as the door of Montag's house opened. In it, with two suitcases in her hands, stood Mildred. When she saw her husband she came down the steps quickly, with a dream-like rigidity, looking at the third button on his coat.

“Mildred!”

She said nothing.

“Okay, Montag, up with the hose and ax.”

“Just a moment, Mr. Leahy. Mildred, you didn't telephone this call in, did you?”

 

S
HE WALKED PAST HIM
with her arms stiff and at the ends of them, in the sharp, red-nailed fingers, the valise handles. Her mouth was bloodless.

“You didn't!”

She shoved the valises into a waiting taxi-beetle and climbed in and sat there, staring straight ahead

Montag started toward her. Leahy caught his arm.

“Come on, Montag.”

The cab drove away slowly down the lighted street.

There was a crystal tinkling as Stoneman and Black chopped the windows to provide fine drafts for fire.

Mr. Montag walked but did not feel his feet touch the walk, nor the hose in his icy hands, nor did he hear Leahy talking continually as they reached the door.

“Pour the kerosene on, Montag.”

Montag stood gazing in at the queer house, made strange by the hour of the night, by the murmur of neighbor voices, by the littered glass, the lights blazing, and there on the floor, their covers plucked off, the pages spilled about like pigeon feathers, were his incredible books, and they looked so pitiful and silly and not worth bothering with, for they were nothing but type and paper and raveled binding.

Montag stepped forward in a huge silence and picked up one of the pages of the books and read what it had to say.

He had read only three lines when Leahy snatched the paper from him.

“Oh, no,” he said, smiling. “Because then we'd have to burn your mind, too. Mustn't have that.” He stepped back. “Ready?”

“Ready.” Montag snapped the valve lock on the fire-thrower.

“Aim,” said Leahy.

“Aim.”

“Fire!”

He burned the television set first and then the radio and he burned the motion picture projector and he burned the films and the gossip magazines and the litter of cosmetics on a table, and he took pleasure in it all, and he burned the walls because he wanted to change everything, the chairs, the table, the paintings. He didn't want to remember that he had lived here with some strange woman who would forget him tomorrow, who had gone and forgotten him already and was listening to a radio as she rode across town. So he burned the room with a precise fury.

“The books, Montag, the books!”

He directed the fire at the books. The books leaped and danced, like roasting birds, their wings frantically ablaze in red and yellow feathers. They fell in charred lumps.

“Get that one there, get it!” directed Leahy, pointing.