of a straight-backed chair and moved it slowly and steadily into the hall near the front door and climbed up on it and stood for a moment like a statue on a pedestal, his wife standing under him, waiting. Then he reached up and pulled back the grille of the air-conditioning system and reached far back inside to the right and moved still another sliding sheet of metal and took out a book. Without looking at it he dropped it to the floor. He put his hand back up and took out two books and moved his hand down and dropped the two books to the floor. He kept moving his hand and dropping books, small ones, fairly large ones, yellow, red, green ones. When he was done he looked down upon some twenty books lying at his wife’s feet.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t really think. But now it looks as if we’re in this together.”
Mildred backed away as if she were suddenly confronted by a pack of mice that had come up out of the floor. He could hear her breathing rapidly and her face was paled out and her eyes were fastened wide. She said his name over, twice, three times. Then moaning, she ran forward, seized a book and ran toward the kitchen incinerator.
He caught her, shrieking. He held her and she tried to fight away from him, scratching.
“No, Millie, no! Wait! Stop it, will you? You don’t know… stop it!” He slapped her face, he grabbed her again and shook her.
She said his name and began to cry.
“Millie!” he said. “Listen. Give me a second, will you? We can’t do anything. We can’t burn these. I want to look at them, at least look at them once. Then if what the Captain says is true, we’ll burn them together, believe me, we’ll burn them together. You must help me.” He looked down into her face and took hold of her chin and held her firmly. He was looking not only at her, but for himself and what he must do, in her face. “Whether we like this or not, we’re in it. I’ve never asked for much from you in all these years, but I ask it now, I plead for it. We’ve got to start somewhere here, figuring out why we’re in such a mess, you and the medicine at night, and the car, and me and my work. We’re heading right for the cliff, Millie. God, I don’t want to go over. This isn’t going to be easy. We haven’t anything to go on, but maybe we can piece it out and figure it and help each other. I need you so much right now, I can’t tell you. If you love me at all you’ll put up with this, twenty four, forty eight hours, that’s all I ask, then it’ll be over. I promise, I swear! And if there is something here, just one little thing out of a whole mess of things, maybe we can pass it on to someone else.”
She wasn’t fighting any more, so he let her go. She sagged away from him and slid down the wall, and sat on the floor looking at the books. Her foot touched one and she saw this and pulled her foot away.
“That woman, the other night, Millie, you weren’t there. You didn’t see her face. And Clarisse. You never talked to her. I talked to her. And men like Beatty are afraid of her. I can’t understand it. Why should they be so afraid of someone like her? But I kept putting her alongside the firemen in the house last night, and I suddenly realized I didn’t like them at all, and I didn’t like myself at all any more. And I thought maybe it would be best if the firemen themselves were burnt.”
“Guy!”
The front door voice called softly:
“Mrs. Montag, Mrs. Montag, someone here, someone here, Mrs. Montag, Mrs. Montag, someone here.”
Softly.
They turned to stare at the door and the books toppled everywhere, everywhere in heaps.
“Beatty!” said Mildred.
“It can’t be him.”
“He’s come back!” she whispered.
The front door voice called again softly. “Someone here…”
“We won’t answer.”
Montag lay back against the wall and then slowly sank to a crouching position and began to nudge the books, bewilderedly, with his thumb, his forefinger. He was shivering and he wanted above all to shove the books up through the ventilator again, but he knew he could not face Beatty again. He crouched and then he sat and the voice of the front door spoke again, more insistently. Montag picked a single small volume from the floor.
“Where do we begin?” He opened the book half-way and peered at it. “We begin by beginning, I guess.”
“He’ll come in,” said Mildred, “and burn us and the books!”
The front door voice faded at last. There was a silence. Montag felt the presence of someone beyond the door, waiting, listening. Then the footsteps going away down the walk and over the lawn.
“Let’s see what this is,” said Montag.
He spoke the words haltingly and with a terrible selfconsciousness. He read a dozen pages here and there and came at last to this:
“It is computed that eleven thousand persons have at several times suffered death rather than submit to break eggs at the smaller end.”
Mildred sat across the hall from him. “What does it mean? It doesn’t mean anything! The Captain was right!”
“Here now,” said Montag. “We’ll start over again, at the beginning.”
Part II
The Sieve and the Sand
They read the long afternoon through, while the cold November rain fell from the sky upon the quiet house. They sat in the hall because the parlour was so empty and grey-looking without its walls lit with orange and yellow confetti and sky-rockets and women in gold-mesh dresses and men in black velvet pulling one-hundred-pound rabbits from silver hats. The parlour was dead and Mildred kept peering in at it with a blank expression as Montag paced the floor and came back and squatted down and read a page as many as ten times, aloud.
“We cannot tell the precise moment when friendship is formed. As in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over, so in a series of kindnesses there is at last one which makes the heart run over.”
Montag sat listening to the rain.
“Is that what it was in the girl next door? I’ve tried so hard to figure.”
“She’s dead. Let’s talk about someone alive, for goodness’ sake.”
Montag did not look back at his wife as he went trembling along the hall to the kitchen, where he stood a long. time watching the rain hit the windows before he came back down the hall in the grey light, waiting for the tremble to subside.
He opened another book.
“That favourite subject, Myself.”
He squinted at the wall.
“The favourite subject, Myself.”
“I understand that one,” said Mildred.
“But Clarisse’s favourite subject wasn’t herself. It was everyone else, and me. She was the first person in a good many years I’ve really liked. She was the first person I can remember who looked straight at me as if I counted.” He lifted the two books. “These men have been dead a long time, but I know their words point, one way or another, to Clarisse.”
Outside the front door, in the rain, a faint scratching.
Montag froze. He saw Mildred thrust herself back to the wall and gasp.
“Someone – the door – why doesn’t the door-voice tell us – ”
“I shut it off.”
Under the door-sill, a slow, probing sniff, an exhalation of electric steam.
Mildred laughed.
“It’s only a dog, that’s what! You want me to shoo him away?”
“Stay where you are!”
Silence. The cold rain falling. And the smell of blue electricity blowing under the locked door.
“Let’s get back to work,” said Montag quietly.
Mildred kicked at