“What do you want for lunch?” asked Mildred.
“How can you be hungry at a time like this!”
“You’re going to work tonight, aren’t you?”
“I’m doing more than that,” he said. “I’m going to start killing people and raving and buying books!”
“A one man revolution?” she said, lightly. “They’d put you in jail.”
“That’s not a bad idea.” He put his clothes on, furiously, walking about the bedroom. “But I’d kill a few people before I did get locked up. There’s a real bastard, that Leahy, did you hear him? Knows all the answers, but does nothing about it!”
“I won’t have anything to do with all this junk,” she said.
“No?” he said. “This is your house, isn’t it, as well as mine?”
“Yes.”
“Then look at this!”
She watched as he ran into the hall, peered up at a little ceiling vent. He got a chair and climbed up and opened the vent. Reaching in, he began tossing books, big books, little books, red, yellow, green, black-covered books, ten, thirty, forty of them into the parlor at her feet. “There,” he cried. “So you’re not in this with me? You’re in it up to your neck!”
“Leonard!” She stood looking at them. She looked at the house, the furniture. “They’ll burn our house down if they find these, and put us in jail for life or kill us.” She edged away, wailing.
“Let them try!”
She hesitated, and then in one motion bent and threw a book at the fireplace.
He caught her, shrieking, and took another book from her hand. “Oh, no, Millie, no. Never touch these books. If you do I’ll give you the beating of your life.” He shook her. “Listen.” He held her very firmly and her face bobbed; tears streaked down her rouged cheeks. “You’re going to help me. You’re in it now. You’re going to read a book, one of these. Sit down. I’ll help you. You’re going to do something with me about men like Leahy and this city we live in. Do you hear me?”
“Yes, I hear.” Her body was sagging.
The door bell rang.
They both jerked about to glance at the door and the books strewn about in heaps.
The door bell rang again.
“Sit down.” Montag pushed his wife gently into the chair. He handed her a book.
The bell rang a third time.
“Read.” He pointed to a page. “Out loud.”
“The tongue of the wise useth knowledge aright.”
The bell sounded.
“Go on.”
“But the mouth of fools poureth out foolishness.”
Another ring.
“They’ll go away after a while,” said Montag.
“A wholesome tongue is a tree of life.”
In the distance, Montag thought he heard a fire siren.
The Sieve and the Sand
THEY READ THE LONG AFTERNOON THROUGH, WHILE THE fire flickered and blew the hearth and the rain fell from the sky over the house. Now and again, Mr. Montag would quietly light a cigarette and puff it, or go 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 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 cigarette smoke idled, 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 think on 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 said, taking the book. “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,” she said.
“But you remember some of it.”
“Nothing.”
“Try.”
She tried to remember and tell it. “Nothing.”
“You’ll learn, in time. Doesn’t some of the beauty get through to you?”
“I don’t like books, I don’t understand them, 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 our house. They’ll burn our books and kill us. Now, I’m sick.”
“Poor Millie,” 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 again.”
“Thanks.”
“But you must listen. I’ll explain. And one day you’ll understand why these books are so fine.”
“I’ll never learn.”
“You must, if you want to be free.”
“I’m free already, I couldn’t be freer.”
“But aware, no. You’re like the moth that got caught in the interior of a bell at midnight. Numb with concussion, drunk on sound. Thirty years of that confounded blatting radio, no ideas, no beauty, just noise. A moth in a bell. And we’ve got to—”
“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 to this for a while every day,” she cried. “But I’ve got to have my radio, too. You can’t take that away from me!”
“Millie.”
The telephone rang. They both started. She snatched it up, and was almost immediately laughing. “Hello, Ann, yes, yes! Of course. Tonight. Yes. You come here. Yes, the Clown’s on tonight, yes and the Terror, it’ll be nice.”
Mr. Montag shuddered. He left the room. He walked through the house, thinking. Leahy. The Fire House. These books.
“I’ll shoot him, tonight,” he said, aloud. “I’ll kill Leahy. That’ll be one censor out of the way. No.” He laughed coldly. “For I’ll have to shoot most of the people in the world. How does one start a revolution? What can a single lonely man do?”
Mildred was chattering. The radio was back on again, thundering.
And then he remembered, about a year ago, walking through a park alone he had come upon a man in a black suit unawares. The man had been reading something. Montag hadn’t seen a book, he had seen the man move hastily, and his face was flushed, and he had jumped up as if to run, and Montag had said, “Sit down.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“No one said you did.”
They had sat in the park all afternoon. Montag had drawn the man out. He was a retired professor of English literature, who had lost his job forty years before when the last college of arts had been closed. His name was William Faber, and yes, shyly, fearfully, he produced a little book of American Poems he had been reading, “Just to know I’m alive,” said Mr. Faber. “Just to know where I am and what things are. To be aware. Most of my friends aren’t aware. Most of them can’t talk. They stutter and halt and hunt words. And what they talk is sales and profits and what they saw on television the hour before.”
What a nice afternoon that had been. Professor Faber had read some of the poems to him, none of which he understood, but the sounds were good, and slowly the meaning crept in. When it was over, Montag said, “I’m a fireman.”
Faber had almost died on the spot from a heart attack.
“Don’t be afraid. I won’t turn you in,” said Montag. “I’ve stopped being mean about it years ago. I take long walks. No one walks anymore. Do you have the same trouble? Are you stopped by the police as a robbery or burglary suspect simply because you’re on foot?”
He and Faber had laughed, exchanged addresses verbally, and parted. He had never seen Faber again. It wouldn’t be safe to know a former English lit. professor. But now … ?
He dialed the call through.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Professor Faber?”
“Yes. Who is this?”
“This is Mr. Montag. Remember, in the park, a year ago.”
“Oh yes, Mr. Montag. Can I help you?”
“Mr. Faber …”
“Yes?”
“How many copies of Shakespeare are there left in the world?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The voice grew cold.
“I want to know if there are any copies at all.”
“I can’t talk to you now, Montag.”
“This telephone line is closed, there’s no one listening.”
“Is this some sort of trap? I can’t talk to just anyone on the phone.”
“Tell me. Are there any copies left?”
“None!” And Faber hung up.
None. Montag fell back in his chair, gasping. None! None in all the world, none left, none anywhere, all of them destroyed, torn apart, burnt. Shakespeare at last dead for all time to the world! He got up shakily and walked across the room and bent down among the books. He took hold of one and lifted it.
“The plays of Shakespeare, Millie! One last copy and I own it!”
“Fine,” she said.
“If anything should happen to this copy he’d be lost forever. Do you realize what that means, the importance of this copy here in our house.”
“And you have to hand it back to Mr. Leahy tonight to
