Mr. Montag slid down the pole like a man returning to a dream.
“Hey, Montag, you forgot your hat!”
And they were off, the night wind hammering about their siren noise and their mighty metal thunder.
IT WAS A TWO-STORY HOUSE in the old district of town. A century old it was, if it was a day, but it, like many others had been given a thin fireproof coating fifty years ago, and as a result the thin preservative layer seemed to be holding it up. One sneeze and …
“Here we are, boys!”
Leahy and Stone and Black clubbered across the sidewalk making the ridiculous wet rubber sounds of men in thick soft boots, suddenly odious and fat because of their thick coats, suddenly childlike and full of games because of the thick huge hats on their heads. Mr. Montag followed.
“Is this the right place?”
“Voice on the phone said 757 Oak Knoll, name of Skinner.”
“This is it.”
They walked through the front door.
A woman was running. They caught her.
“I didn’t do anything,” she said. “What did I do? I didn’t harm anyone!”
“Where is it?” Leahy glared about as if the walls were poisonous. “Come on now, fessup, where are they?”
“You wouldn’t take an old woman’s pleasures from her.”
“Save that. It’ll go easier with you if you tell.”
She said nothing but simply swayed before them.
“Let’s have the report, Stone.” Stone produced the telephone alarm card with the complaint signed in telephone duplicate on the back. “It says here, you’ve an attic full of books. All right, men!”
Next thing they were up in the musty blackness, clumping with their boots and swinging hatchets at doors that were unlocked, tumbling through like children at a playpool in summer, all rollick and shout. “Hey!” A fountain of books leaped down upon Montag as he climbed shuddering up the steep stair well.
Books struck his head, his shoulders, his upturned, lined, pale face. He held his hands up and a book landed obediently in them, like an open flower! In the dim light a page fell open and it was like a petal with words delicately flourished there. In all the fervor and rushing he had only time to read a line, but it blazed in his mind for the next minute, as if he had been stamped with a hot bronze iron. He dropped the book, but almost immediately another fell into his hand.
“Hey, there, you, come on!”
Montag closed his hand like a trap on the book, he crushed it to his breast. Another fount descended, a gush of books, a torrent of literature, Stone and Black seizing and hurling them down in shovelfuls from above, down down through dusty space, through the echoing house toward Montag and the woman who stood like a small girl under the collecting ruin. “Come on, Montag!”
And he was forced to clump up and in to lend a hand, though he fell twice.
“In here!”
“This too shall pass away.”
“What?” Leahy glared at him.
Montag stopped, blinking, in the dark.
“Did I say something?”
“Don’t stand there, idiot, move!”
The books lay in piles like fishes left to dry, and the air was so thick with a gunpowdery dust that at any instant it might blow them through the roof into the stars. “Trash! Trash!” The men kicked books. They danced among them. Titles glittered like golden eyes, gone, falling.
“Kerosene!”
Stone and Black pumped out the fluid from the white hose they had carried up the stairs. They coated each remaining book with the shining stuff. They pumped it into rooms.
“This is better than the old man’s place last night, eh?”
That had been different. The old man had lived in an apartment house with other people. They had had to use controlled fire there. Here, they could rampage the whole house.
When they ran downstairs, with Montag reeling after them, the house was aflame with kerosene. The walls were drenched.
“Come on, woman!”
“My books,” she said, quietly. She stood among them now, kneeling down to touch them, to run fingers over the leather, reading the golden titles with fingers instead of eyes, by touch in this instant, while her eyes accused Montag. “You can’t take my books. They’re my whole life.”
“You know the law,” said Leahy.
“But …”
“Confusion. People who never existed. Fantasy, pure fantasy all of it. No two books alike, none agreeing. Come on now, lady, out of your house, it’ll burn.”
“No,” she said.
“The whole thing’ll go up in one bloom.”
“No.”
The three men went to the door. They looked at Montag who stood near the woman. “Okay, Montag.”
“You’re not going to leave her here?” he protested.
“She won’t come.”
“But you must force her!”
Leahy raised his hand. It contained the concealed igniter to start the fire. “No time. Got to get back to the station. Besides, she’d cost us a trial, money, months, jail, all that.” He examined his wristwatch. “Got to get back on the alert.”
Montag put his hand on the woman’s arm. “You can come with me. Here, let me help you.”
“No.” She actually saw him for a moment. “Thank you, anyway.”
“I’m counting to ten,” said Leahy. “Outside, Montag! Stone. Black.” He began counting. “One. Two.”
“Lady,” said Montag.
“Go on,” she said.
“Three,” said Leahy.
“Come on,” said Montag, tugging at her.
“I like it here,” she said.
“Four. Five,” said Leahy.
He tried to pull her, but she twisted, he slipped and fell. She ran up the stairs and stood there, with the books at her feet.
“Six. Seven. Montag,” said Leahy.
Montag did not move. He looked out the door at that man there with the apparatus in his hand. He felt the book hidden against his chest.
“Go get him,” said Leahy.
Stone and Black dragged Montag yelling from the house.
Leahy backed out after them, leaving a kerosene trail down the walk. When they were a hundred feet from the house, Montag was still kicking at the two men. He glanced back wildly.
In the front door where she had come to look out at them quietly, her quietness a condemnation, staring straight into Mr. Leahy’s eyes, was the woman. She had a book in one hand.
Leahy reached down and ignited the kerosene.
People ran out on their porches all down the street.
“WHO IS IT?”
“Who would it be?” said Mr. Montag, now leaning against the closed door in the dark.
His wife said, at last. “Well, put on the light.”
“No.”
“Why not? Turn it on.”
“I don’t want the light.”
The room was black.
“Take off your clothes. Come to bed.”
“What?”
He heard her roll impatiently; the springs squeaked. “Are you drunk?”
He took off his clothes. He worked out of his coat and let it slump to the floor. He removed his pants and held them in the air and let them drop.
His wife said, “What are you doing?”
He balanced himself in the room with the book in his sweating, icy hand.
A minute later she said, “Just don’t stand there in the middle of the room.”
He made a sound.
“What?” she asked.
He made more sounds. He walked to the bed and shoved the book clumsily under the pillow. He fell into the bed and his wife called out at this. He lay separate from her. She talked to him for a long while and when he didn’t answer but only made sounds, he felt her hand creep over, up along his chest, his throat, his chin. Her hand brushed his cheeks. He knew that she pulled her hand away from his cheeks wet.
A long time later, when he was at last drifting into sleep, he heard her say, “You smell of kerosene …”
Late in the night he looked over at Mildred. She was awake. Many nights in the past ten years he had come awake and found her with her eyes open in the dim room. She would look that way, blankly, for an hour or more, and then rise and go into the bathroom. You could hear the water run into the glass, the tinkle of the sedatives bottle, and Mildred gulping hungrily, frantically, at sleep.
She was awake now. In a minute she would rise and go for the barbiturate.
And suddenly she was so strange to him that he couldn’t believe that he knew her at all. He was in someone else’s house, with a woman he had never seen before, and this made him shift uneasily under the covers.
“Awake?” she whispered.
“Yes. Millie?”
“What?”
“Mildred, when did we meet? And where?”
“For what?” she asked.
“I mean, originally.”
She was frowning in the dark.
He clarified it. “The first time we met, where, when?”
“Why it was at—”
She stopped.
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I,” he said, frightened. “Can’t you remember?”
They both tried to remember.
“It’s been so long.”
“We’re only thirty!”
“Don’t get excited—I’m trying to think!”
“Think, then!”
She laughed. “Wait until I tell Rene! How funny, not to remember where or when you met your wife or husband!”
He did not laugh, but lay there with his eyes tight, his face screwed up, pressing and massaging his brow, tapping and thumping his blind head again and again.
”It can’t be very important.” She was up, in the bath now, the water running, the swallowing sound.
“No, not very,” he said.
And he wondered, did she take two tablets now, or twenty, like a year ago, when we had to pump her stomach at the hospital, and me shouting to keep her awake, walking her, asking her why she did it, why she wanted to die, and she said she didn’t know, she didn’t know, she didn’t know anything about anything. But he
