The Fireman Page 3

  "Tomorrow, the next day, first of the week, I..."

  "We've been wondering about you." Leahy put a cigar in his mouth. "Every fireman goes through this. They only need understanding, need to know how the wheels run, what the history of our profession is. They don't give it to rookies any more. Only fire chiefs remember it now. I'll let you in on it." He lit the cigar leisurely.

  Mildred fidgeted.

  "You ask yourself about the burning of books, why, how, when." Leahy exuded a great gray cloud of smoke.

  "Maybe," said Montag.

  "It started around about the Civil War, I'd say. Photography discovered. Fast printing presses coming up. Films at the early part of the 20th Century. Radio. Television. Things began to have mass, Montag, mass."

  "I see."

  "And because they had mass, they became simpler. Books, now. Once they appealed to various small groups of people, here and there. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of mass and elbows. Films and radios and magazines and books had to level down to a sort of paste-pudding norm. Do you follow me?"

  "I think so."

  Leahy looked through a veil of smoke, not at Montag, but at the thing he was describing. "Picture it. The 19th Century man with his horses, dogs, and slow living. You might call him a slow motion man. Then in the 20th Century you speed up the camera."

  "A good analogy."

  "Splendid. Books get shorter. Condensations appear. Digests. Tabloids. Radio programs simplify. Everything sublimates itself to the gag, the snap ending."

  "Snap ending." Mildred nodded approvingly. "You should have heard last night — "

  "Great classics are cut to fit fifteen minute shows, then two minute book columns, then two line digest resumes. Magazines become picture books. Out of the nursery to the college, back to the nursery, in a few short centuries!"

  MILDRED arose. She was losing the thread of the talk, Montag knew, and when this happened she began to fiddle with things. She went about the room, picking up.

  "Faster and faster the film, Mr. Montag! Quick, Click, Pic, Look. Eye, Now! Flick, Flash, Here, There, Swift, Up, Down, Why, How, Who, Eh? Mr. Montag, digest-digests, political affairs in one column, a sentence, a headline, and then, in mid-air, vanish! The mind of man, whirling so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, publicists, ad men, broadcasters that the centrifuge throws off all ideas! He is unable to concentrate!"

  Mildred was smoothing the bed now. Montag felt panic as she approached his pillow to straighten it. In a moment, with sublime innocence, she would be pulling the hidden book out from behind the pillow and displaying it as if it were a reptile!

  Leahy blew a cumulus of cigar smoke at the ceiling. "School is shortened, discipline relaxed, philosophies, histories, languages dropped, English and spelling neglected, finally ignored. Life is immediate. The job counts. Why learn anything save pressing buttons, pulling switches, fitting bolts?"

  "Let me fix your pillow," said Mildred, being the video housewife.

  "No," whispered Montag.

  "The zipper replaces the button. Does a man have time to think while dressing in the morning, a philosophical time?"

  "No," said Montag, automatically.

  Mildred tugged at the pillow.

  "Get away," said Montag.

  "Life becomes one big Prat Fall, Mr. Montag. No more subtleties. Everything is bang and boff and wow!"

  "Wow," reflected Mildred, yanking the pillow edge.

  "For God's sake, let me be!" cried Montag, passionately.

  Leahy stared.

  Mildred's hand was frozen behind the pillow. Her hand was on the book, her face stunned, her mouth opening to ask a question...

  "Theaters stand empty, Mr. Montag, replaced by television and baseball and sports where nobody has to think at all, not at all, at all." Now Leahy was almost invisible, a voice somewhere back of a choking screen of cigar smoke.

  "What's this?" asked Mildred, with delight, almost. Montag crushed and heaved back against her hands. "What've you hid there?"

  "Sit down!" Montag screamed. She jumped back, her hands empty. "We're talking!"

  LEAHY continued, mildly. "Cartoons everywhere. Books become cartoons. The mind drinks less and less. Impatience. Time to kill. No work, all leisure. Highways full of crowds going somewhere, anywhere, nowhere. The gasoline refugee, towns becoming motels, people in nomadic surges from city to city, impatient, following the moon tides, living tonight in the room where you slept last night and I the night before."

  Mildred went into the other room and slammed the door. She turned on the radio.

  "Go on," said Montag.

  "Intelligent writers gave up in disgust. Magazines were vanilla tapioca. The book buyer, bored by dishwater, his brain spinning, quit buying. Everyone but the comic-publisher died a slow publishing death. There you have it. Don't blame the Government. Technology, mass exploitation, and censorship from frightened officials did

  the trick. Today, thanks to them, you can read comics, confessions, or trade journals, nothing else. All the rest is dangerous."

  "Yes, but why the firemen?" asked Montag.

  "Ah," said Leahy, leaning forward in the clouds of smoke to finish. "With schools turning out doers instead of thinkers, with non-readers, naturally, in ignorance, they hated and feared books. You always fear an unfamiliar thing. 'Intellectual' became a swear word. Books were snobbish things.

  "The little man wants you and me to be like him. Not everyone born free and equal, as the Constitution says, but everyone made equal. A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot out of the weapon. Unbreach men's minds.

  Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man? And so, when houses became all fireproof and there was no longer need of firemen for protection, they were given the new job, as official censors, judges, jurors, punishers. That's you, Mr. Montag, and me."

  Leahy stood up. "I've got to get going."

  Montag lay back in bed. "Thanks for explaining it to me."

  "You must understand our civilization is so vast that we can't have our minorities upset and stirred. People must be contented. Books bother them. Colored people don't like Little Black Sambo. We burn it. White people don't like Uncle Tom's Cabin. Burn it, too. Anything for serenity."

  Leahy shook Montag's limp hand.

  "Oh, one last thing. Once in his career, every fireman gets curious. What do the books say, he wonders. A good question. Well, they say nothing, Mr. Montag. Nothing you can touch or believe in. They're about non-existent people, figments. Not to be trusted. But anyway, say, a fireman 'takes' a book, at a fire, almost by 'accident.' A natural error."

  "Natural."

  "We allow that. We let him keep it 24 hours. If he hasn't burned it by then, we burn it for him."

  "I see," said Montag. His throat was dry.

  "You'll be at work tonight at six o'clock?"

  "No."

  "What!"

  Montag shut his eyes. "I'll be in later, maybe."

  "See that you do."

  "I'll never come in again!" yelled Montag, but only in his mind.

  "Get well."

  Leahy, trailing smoke, went out.

  MONTAG watched through the front window as Leahy drove away in his gleaming beetle which was the color of the last fire they had set.

  Mildred had turned on the afternoon television show and was staring into the shadow screen.

  Montag cleared his throat, but she didn't look up.

  "It's only a step," he said, "from not working today, to not working tomorrow, to not working ever again."

  "You're going to work tonight, though?"

  "I'm doing more than that," he said. "I'm going to start to kill people and rave, and buy books!"

  "A one-man revolution," said Mildred, lightly, turning to look at him. "They'd put you in jail, wouldn't they?"

  "That's not a bad idea. The best people are there." He put his clothes on, furiously, walking abou
t the bedroom. "But I'd kill a few people before I did get locked up. There's a real bastard, that Leahy. Did you bear him! Knows all the answers, but does nothing about it!"

  "I won't even listen to all this junk," said Mildred.

  "No?" he said. "This is your house as well as mine, isn't it?"

  "Yes."

  "Then I have something I want you to see, something I put away and never looked at again during the past year, not even knowing why I put them away and hid them and kept them and never told you."

  He dragged a chair into the hall, climbed up on it, and opened an air-vent. Reaching up, he began throwing books, big ones, little ones, red, yellow, green books, twenty, thirty, fifty books, one by one, swiftly, into the parlor at her feet. "There!"

  "Leonard Montag! You didn't!"

  "So you're not in this with me? You're in it up to your neck!"

  She backed away as if she were surrounded by a pack of terrible rats. Her face was paled out and her eyes were fastened wide and she was breathing as if someone had struck her in the stomach. "They'll burn our house. They'll kill us."

  "Let them try."

  She hesitated; then, moaning, she seized a book and ran toward the fireplace.

  He caught her. "No, Millie! No! Never touch my books. Never. Or, by God, if you do, touch just one of them meaning to burn it, believe me, Millie, I'll kill you."

  "Leonard Montag! You wouldn't!"

  HE SHOOK her. "Listen," he pleaded down into her face. He held her shoulders firmly, while her face bobbed helplessly, and tears sprang from her eyes.

  "You must help me," he said, slowly, trying to find his way into her thinking. "You're in this now, whether you like it or not. I've never asked for anything in my life of you, but I ask it now, I plead it. We must start somewhere. We're going to read books. It's a thing we haven't done and must do.

  We've got to know what these books are so we can tell others, and so that, eventually, they can tell everyone. Sit down now, Millie, there, right there. I'll help you, we'll help each other. Between us, we'll do something to destroy men like Leahy and Stoneman and Black and myself, and this world we live in, and put it all back together a different way. Do you hear me?"

  "Yes." Her body sagged.

  The doorbell rang.

  They jerked about to stare at the door and the books toppled everywhere, everywhere in heaps.

  "Leahy!"

  "It can't be him!"

  "He's come back!" sobbed Mildred.

  The bell rang again.

  "Let him stand out there. We won't answer." Montag reached blindly for a book on the floor, any book, any beginning, any start, any beauty at all would do. He put the book into Mildred's shaking hands.

  The bell rang a third time, insistently.

  "Read." He quivered a hand to a page. "Out loud."

  Mildred's eyes were on the door and the bell rang angrily, loudly, again and again. "He'll come in," she said, "oh, God, and set fire to everything, and us."

  But at last she found the line, with Montag standing over her, swaying, any line in the book, and after trying it four times, she began to fumble out the words of a poem printed there on the white, unburned paper: "And evening vanish and no more, The low pale light across the land — "

  The bell rang. "Nor now the long light on the sea — And here face downward in the sun..."

  Another ring.

  Montag whispered. "He'll go away in a minute."

  Mildred's lips trembled: "To feel how swift, how secretly The shadow of the night comes on..."

  Near the ceiling, smoke from Leahy's cigar still lingered.

  II

  The Sieve and the Sand

  THEY read the long afternoon through, while the fire flickered and blew on the hearth and the October rain fell from the sky upon the strangely quiet house. Now and again, Mr. Montag would silently pace the room, or bring in a bottle of cold beer and drink it easily or say, "Will you read that part over again? Isn't that an idea now?"

  And Mildred's voice, as colorless as a beer bottle which contains a rare and beautiful wine but does not know it, went on enclosing the words in plain glass, pouring forth the beauties with a loose mouth, while her drab eyes moved over the words and over the words and the rain rained and the hour grew late.

  They read a man named Shakespeare and a man named Poe and part of a book by a man named Matthew and one named Mark. On occasion, Mildred glanced fearfully at the window.

  "Go on," said Mr. Montag.

  "Someone might be watching. That might've been Mr. Leahy at our door a while back."

  "Whoever it was went away. Read that last section again. I want to understand that."

  She read from the works of Jefferson and Lincoln.

  When it was five o'clock her hands dropped open. "I'm tired. Can I stop now?" Her voice was hoarse.

  "How thoughtless of me." He took a book from her. "But isn't it beautiful, Millie? The words, and the thoughts, aren't they exciting?"

  "I don't understand any of it."

  "But surely..."

  "Just words."

  "But you remember some of it."

  "Nothing."

  "You'll learn. It's difficult at first."

  "I don't like books," she said. "I don't understand books. They're over my head. They're for Professors and radicals and I don't want to read any more. Please, promise you won't make me."

  "Mildred!"

  "I'm afraid," she said, putting her face into her shaking hands. "I'm so terribly frightened by these ideas, by Mr. Leahy, and having these books in the house. They'll burn our books and kill us. Now, I'm sick."

  "I'm sorry," he said at last, sighing. "I've put you on trial, haven't I? I'm way out front, trying to drag you, when I should be walking beside you, barely touching. I expect too much. It'll take months to put you in the frame of mind where you can receive the ideas in these books. It's not fair of me. All right, you won't have to read aloud again."

  "Thanks."

  "But you must listen. I'll explain."

  "I'll never learn. I just know I won't."

  "You must if you want to be free."

  "I'm free already. I couldn't be freer."

  "You can't be free if you're not aware."

  "Why do you want to ruin us" with all this?" she asked.

  "Listen," he said.

  SHE listened. Jet-bombers were crossing the sky over their house.

  Those quick gasps in the heavens, as if a running giant had drawn his breath. Those sharp, almost quiet whistles, here and gone in so much less than an instant that one almost believed one had heard nothing. And seeing nothing in the sky, if you did look, was worse than seeing something.

  There was a feeling as if a great invisible fan was whirring blade after hostile blade across the stars, with giant murmurs and no motion, perhaps only a faint trembling of starlight. All night, every night of their lives, they had heard those jet sounds and seen nothing, until, like the tick of a clock or a time-bomb, it had come to be unnoticed, for it was the sound of today and the sound of today dying, the Cheyne-Stokes respiration of civilization.

  "I want to know why and how we are where we are," said Montag. "How did those bombers get in the sky every instant? Why have there been three semi-atomic wars since 1960? Where did we take the wrong turn? What can we do about it? Only the books know this. Maybe the books can't solve my problem, but they can bring me out in the light. And they might stop us from going on with the same insane mistakes."

  "You can't stop wars. There've always been wars."

  "No, I can't. War's so much a part of us now that in the last three days, though we're on the very rim of war, people hardly mention it. Ignoring it, at least, isn't the answer. But now, about us. We must have a schedule of reading. An hour in the morning. An hour or so in the afternoon. Two hours in the evening — "

  "You're not going to forbid me my radio, are you?" Her voice rose.

  "Well, to start..."

  She was up in a fury, raging at
him. "I'll sit and listen if you want me to for a while every day," she cried. "But I've got to have my radio programs, too, and every night on the t-v — you can't take that away from me!"

  "But don't you see? That's the very thing I'd like to counteract—"

  The telephone rang. They both started. Mildred snatched it up and was almost immediately laughing. "Hello, Ann. Yes, oh, yes! Tonight, you come here. Yes, the White Clown's on tonight and the Terror will be fun."