He took hold of a straight back 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. And he reached up and
pulled back the grill the air
conditioning system, which far
back inside to the right and
was 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
20 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." Montag laid
back against the wall and then
slowly sank to a crouching
position and began to nudge the
books bewilderedly with his thumb
and 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. "Let's see
what this is," said Montag. He spoke
the words haltingly and with a terrible
self-consciousness. He read a dozen pages here and there and came at last to
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
at the beginning." They read the long afternoon through, while the cold
November rain fell from the sky upon the quiet house. The parlor
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's that last a drop
makes it run over, so in a series of kindness there is that
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."
He opened another book.
" `That favorite subject, Myself."'
He squinted at the wall. " `The favorite subject, Myself."'
"But Clarisse's favorite 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."
Montag walked to the kitchen and threw the book down.
"Montag," he said, "you're really stupid. Where do we go from here?"
