Montag found himself at the parlor door with his food still in his mouth.
“Doesn’t everyone look nice!”
“Nice.”
“You look fine, Millie!”
“Fine.”
“Everyone looks swell.”
“Swell!”
Montag stood watching them.
“Patience,” whispered Faber.
“I shouldn’t be here,” whispered Montag, almost to himself. “I should be on my way back to you with the money!”
“Tomorrow’s time enough. Careful!”
“Isn’t this show wonderful?” cried Mildred.
“Wonderful!”
On one wall a woman smiled and drank orange juice simultaneously. How does she do both at once, thought Montag, insanely. In the other walls an X ray of the same woman revealed the contracting journey of the refreshing beverage on its way to her delighted stomach! Abruptly the room took off on a rocket flight into the clouds; it plunged into a lime-green sea where blue fish ate red and yellow fish. A minute later, three White Cartoon Clowns chopped off each other’s limbs to the accompaniment of immense incoming tides of laughter. Two minutes more and the room whipped out of town to the jet cars wildly circling an arena, bashing and backing up and bashing each other again. Montag saw a number of bodies fly in the air.
“Millie, did you see that?”
“I saw it, I saw it!”
Montag reached inside the parlor wall and pulled the main switch. The images drained away, as if the water had been let from a gigantic crystal bowl of hysterical fish.
The three women turned slowly and looked with unconcealed irritation and then dislike at Montag.
“When do you suppose the war will start?” he said. “I notice your husbands aren’t here tonight.”
“Oh, they come and go, come and go,” said Mrs. Phelps. “In again out again Finnegan, the Army called Pete yesterday. He’ll be back next week. The Army said so. Quick war. Forty-eight hours they said, and everyone home. That’s what the Army said. Quick war. Pete was called yesterday and they said he’d be back next week. Quick. . . .”
The three women fidgeted and looked nervously at the empty mud-colored walls.
“I’m not worried,” said Mrs. Phelps. “I’ll let Pete do all the worrying.” She giggled. “I’ll let old Pete do all the worrying. Not me. I’m not worried.”
“It’s always someone else’s husband dies, they say.”
“I’ve heard that, too. I’ve never known any dead man killed in a war. Killed jumping off buildings, yes, like Gloria’s husband last week, but from wars? No.”
“Not from wars,” said Mrs. Phelps. “Anyway, Pete and I always said, no tears, nothing like that. It’s our third marriage each and we’re independent. Be independent, we always said. He said, if I get killed off, you just go right ahead and don’t cry, but get married again, and don’t think of me.”
“That reminds me,” said Mildred. “Did you see that Clara Dove five-minute romance last night in your wall? Well, it was all about this woman who—”
Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women’s faces as he had once looked at the face of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. The faces of those enameled creatures meant nothing to him, though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to be of that religion, trying to know what that religion was, trying to get enough of the raw incense and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his blood to feel touched and concerned by the meaning of the colorful men and women with the porcelain eyes and the blood-ruby lips.
But there was nothing, nothing; it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay. So it was now, in his own parlor, with these women twisting in their chairs under his gaze, lighting cigarettes, blowing smoke, touching their sun-fired hair and examining their blazing fingernails as if they had caught fire from his look. Their faces grew haunted with silence. They leaned forward at the sound of Montag’s swallowing his final bite of food. They listened to his feverish breathing. The three empty walls of the room were like the pale brows of sleeping giants now, empty of dreams. Montag felt that if you touched these three staring brows, you would feel a fine salt sweat on your fingertips. The perspiration gathered with the silence and the subaudible trembling around and about and in the women who were burning with tension. Any moment they might hiss a long sputtering hiss and explode.
Montag moved his lips.
“Let’s talk.”
The women jerked and stared.
“How’re your children, Mrs. Phelps?” he asked.
“You know I haven’t any! No one in his right mind, the Good Lord knows, would have children!” said Mrs. Phelps, not quite sure why she was angry with this man.
“I wouldn’t say that,” said Mrs. Bowles. “I’ve had two children by Caesarean section. No use going through all that agony for a baby. The world must reproduce, you know, the race must go on. Besides, they sometimes look just like you, and that’s nice. Two Caesareans turned the trick, yes, sir. Oh, my doctor said, Caesareans aren’t necessary; you’ve got the hips for it, everything’s normal, but I insisted.”
“Caesareans or not, children are ruinous; you’re out of your mind,” said Mrs. Phelps.
“I plunk the children in school nine days out of ten. I put up with them when they come home three days a month; it’s not bad at all. You heave them into the ‘parlor’ and turn the switch. It’s like washing clothes; stuff laundry in and slam the lid.” Mrs. Bowles tittered. “They’d just as soon kick as kiss me. Thank God, I can kick back!”
The women showed their tongues, laughing.
Mildred sat a moment and then, seeing that Montag was still in the doorway, clapped her hands. “Let’s talk politics, to please Guy!”
“Sounds fine,” said Mrs. Bowles. “I voted last election, same as everyone, and I laid it on the line for President Noble. I think he’s one of the nicest looking men ever became president.”
“Oh, but the man they ran against him!”
“He wasn’t much, was he? Kind of small and homely and he didn’t shave too close or comb his hair very well.”
“What possessed the ‘Outs’ to run him? You just don’t go running a little short man like that against a tall man. Besides—he mumbled. Half the time I couldn’t hear a word he said. And the words I did hear I didn’t understand!”
“Fat, too, and didn’t dress to hide it. No wonder the landslide was for Winston Noble. Even their names helped. Compare Winston Noble to Hubert Hoag for ten seconds and you can almost figure the results.”
“Damn it!” cried Montag. “What do you know about Hoag and Noble!”
“Why, they were right in that parlor wall, not six months ago. One was always picking his nose; it drove me wild.”
“Well, Mr. Montag,” said Mrs. Phelps, “do you want us to vote for a man like that?”
Mildred beamed. “You just run away from the door, Guy, and don’t make us nervous.”
But Montag was gone and back in a moment with a book in his hand.
“Guy!”
“Damn it all, damn it all, damn it!”
“What’ve you got there; isn’t that a book? I thought that all special training these days was done by film.” Mrs. Phelps blinked. “You reading up on fireman theory?”
“Theory, hell,” said Montag. “It’s poetry.”
“Montag.” A whisper.
“Leave me alone!” Montag felt himself turning in a great circling roar and buzz and hum.
“Montag, hold on, don’t . . .”
“Did you hear them, did you hear these monsters talking about monsters? Oh God, the way they jabber about people and their own children and themselves and the way they talk about their husbands and the way they talk about war, dammit, I stand here and I can’t believe it!”
“I didn’t say a single word about any war, I’ll have you know,” said Mrs. Phelps.
“As for poetry, I hate it,” said Mrs. Bowles.
“Have you ever heard any?”
“Montag,” Faber’s voice scraped away at him. “You’ll ruin everything. Shut up, you fool!”
All three women were on their feet.
“Sit down!”
They sat.
“I’m going home,” quavered Mrs. Bowles.
“Montag, Montag, please, in the name of God, what’re you up to?” pleaded Faber.
“Why don’t you just read us one of those poems from your little book.” Mrs. Phelps nodded. “I think that’d be very interesting.”
“That’s not right,” wailed Mrs. Bowles. “We can’t do that!”
“Well, look at Mr. Montag, he wants to, I know he does. And if we listen nice, Mr. Montag will be happy and then maybe we can go on and do something else.” She glanced nervously at the long emptiness of the walls enclosing them.
“Montag, go through with this and I’ll cut off, I’ll leave.” The beetle jabbed his ear. “What good is this, what’ll you prove!”
“Scare hell out of them, that’s what, scare the living daylights out!”
Mildred looked at the empty air. “Now, Guy, just who are you talking to?”
A silver needle pierced his brain. “Montag, listen, only one way out, play it as a joke, cover up, pretend you aren’t mad at all. Then—walk to your wall incinerator, and throw the book in!”
Mildred had already anticipated this in a quavery voice. “Ladies, once a year, every fireman’s allowed to bring one book home, from the old days, to show his family how
