Fahrenheit 451 / 451 градус по Фаренгейту. Рэй БрэдбериЧитать онлайн книгу.
1], in the mirror. Later, going to sleep, he would feel the fiery smile still gripped by his face muscles, in the dark. It never went away, that smile, it never ever went away, as long as he remembered.
He hung up his black helmet and shined it, he hung his flameproof jacket neatly; he showered with great pleasure. Then he walked out of the fire station and along the midnight street toward the subway where the silent, air-propelled train slid soundlessly down the tube in the earth and let him out to the escalator rising to the suburb.
Whistling, he walked out into the still night air. He walked toward the corner. Before he reached the corner, however, he slowed as if someone had called his name.
The last few nights he had had the most uncertain feelings about the sidewalk just around the corner here, moving toward his house. He had felt that a moment before he made the turn, someone had been there. There was no understanding it. Each time he made the turn, he saw only the white, unused sidewalk.
But now, tonight, he slowed almost to a stop. He turned the corner.
The autumn leaves blew over the pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. Her face was slender and milk-white; the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them. Her dress was white and it whispered. He almost thought he heard the motion of her hands as she walked. She was a moment away from a man who stood in the middle of the pavement waiting.
The girl stopped. She stood looking at Montag with eyes so dark and shining and alive, that he felt he had said something quite wonderful. But he knew his mouth had only moved to say hello, and then when she seemed hypnotized by the salamander on his arm and the phoenix-disc on his chest, he spoke again.
“Of course,” he said, “you’re a new neighbor, aren’t you?”
“And you must be” – she raised her eyes from his professional symbols – “the fireman.”
“How oddly you say that.”
“I could say it with my eyes shut,” she said, slowly.
“What – the smell of kerosene? My wife always complains,” he laughed. “You never wash it off completely.”
“No, you don’t,” she said.
“Kerosene,” he said, “is like perfume to me.”
“Does it seem like that, really?”
“Of course. Why not?”
She gave herself time to think of it. “I don’t know.” She turned to face the sidewalk going toward their homes. “Do you mind if I walk back with you? I’m Clarisse McClellan.”
“Clarisse. Guy Montag. Come along. What are you doing out so late wandering around? How old are you?”
They walked in the night on the silvered pavement and there was the faintest breath of fresh apricots and strawberries in the air, and he looked around and realized this was quite impossible, so late in the year.
There was only the girl walking with him now. Her face was as bright as snow in the moonlight.
“Well,” she said, “I’m seventeen and I’m crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. ‘When people ask your age,’ he said, ‘always say seventeen and insane.’ Isn’t this a nice time of night to walk? I like to smell things and look at things, and sometimes stay up all night, walking, and watch the sun rise.”
They walked on again in silence and finally she said, thoughtfully, “You know, I’m not afraid of you at all.”
He was surprised. “Why should you be?”
“So many people are afraid of firemen. But you’re just a man, after all[2]…”
Her face, turned to him now, was fragile milk crystal with a soft and constant light in it. And then Clarisse McClellan said:
“Do you mind if I ask? How long have you worked as a fireman?”
“Since I was twenty, ten years ago.”
“Do you ever read any of the books you burn?”
He laughed. “That’s against the law!”
“Oh. Of course.”
“It’s fine work. Monday burn Millay[3], Wednesday Whitman[4], Friday Faulkner[5], burn them to ashes, then burn the ashes. That’s our ofcif ial slogan.”
They walked still further and the girl said, “Is it true that long ago firemen put fires out instead of going to start them?”
“No. Houses have always been fireproof.”
“Strange. I heard once that a long time ago houses used to burn by accident and they needed firemen to stop the flames.”
He laughed.
She glanced quickly over. “Why are you laughing?”
“I don’t know.”
“You laugh when I haven’t been funny and you answer right of.f You never stop to think what I’ve asked you.”
He stopped walking, “You are an odd one,” he said, looking at her. “Haven’t you any respect?”
“I don’t mean to insult you. It’s just, I love to watch people too much, I guess.”
“Well, doesn’t this mean anything to you?” He tapped the numerals 451 stitched on his black sleeve.
“Yes,” she whispered. She increased her pace. “Have you ever watched the jet cars racing on the boulevards down that way?
“You’re changing the subject!”
“I sometimes think drivers don’t know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly,” she said. “If you showed a driver a green blur, he’d say, ‘That’s grass!’ A pink blur? ‘That’s a rose-garden!’ White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on a highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn’t that funny, and sad, too?”
“You think too many things,” said Montag, uneasily.
“I rarely watch TV or go to races or Fun Parks. So I’ve lots of time for crazy thoughts, I guess. Have you seen the two-hundred-foot-long billboards in the country beyond town? Did you know that once billboards were only twenty feet long? But cars started rushing by so quickly they had to stretch the advertising out.”
“I didn’t know that!” Montag laughed abruptly.
“I am sure I know something else you don’t. There’s dew on the grass in the morning.”
He suddenly couldn’t remember if he had known this or not, and it made him quite irritable.
They walked the rest of the way in silence. When they reached her house all its lights were blazing.
“What’s going on?” Montag had rarely seen so many house lights.
“Oh, just my mother and father and uncle sitting around, talking. Oh, we’re most peculiar.”
“But what do you talk about?”
She laughed at this. “Good night!” She turned around and started walking. Then she remembered something and came back to look at him with wonder and curiosity. “Are you happy?” she said.
“Am I what?” he asked.
But she was gone. Her front door shut gently.
“Happy! Nonsense.”
He stopped laughing.
He put his hand into the glove-hole of his front door and let it know his touch. The front door slid open.
“Of course I’m happy. What does she think? I’m not?” he asked the quiet rooms. He stood looking up at the ventilator grille in the hall and suddenly remembered that something
в конце концов
Эдна Сент-Винсент Миллей (1892–1950) – знаменитая американская поэтесса и драматург
Уолт Уитмен (1819–1892) – американский поэт-романтик, публицист
Уильям Фолкнер (1897–1962) – американский писатель, лауреат Нобелевской премии по литературе