Firmin Read Online Free Page A

something other than a dilettante and a buffoon, that I was defeated by inexorable circumstance and not by a flaw within. Let them say, ‘Hard luck, Firmin,’ and not, ‘We could have told you so.’ I scrunch up my eyes and point my telescope, but, alas, it picks out no divine afflatus, magnifies not even a few sparks of genius, discovers nothing but an eating disorder. Instead of telescopes, the doctors will haul out their stethoscopes, their electroencephalograms, their polygraphs, all in support of the crushing diagnosis: a routine case of biblio-bulimia. And the worst of it is, they will be right . And in the face of this essential rightness, the demeaning obviousness of their crushing judgment - crushing is a word I like using - I want to cry out at myself like old Ezra Pound locked in his rat’s cage in Pisa, ‘Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.’ Pound was a Big One.
     
    But enough of this. The small creature I was back then had as yet no inkling of such agonies. Back then, perched on the lowest rung of the ladder of life, I was still the Sabbath child, bonny and blithe, and those were happy days in the bookshop. Or, I should say, happy nights and Sundays, since I did not dare venture out into that flickering vastness during the hours when people were in the store. From our dim basement covert we could hear the murmur of voices and the creak of footsteps on the ceiling. Hear them and tremble. Sometimes the footsteps would leave the ceiling and come down the wooden stairs into the basement. Usually this descent was followed by a period of silence, but sometimes it would be followed by gruntings and growlings, even inexplicable explosions, and these frightened us terribly. After that would come the noise of rushing water, and then footsteps on the stairs again. The footsteps going up were never as loud as the ones coming down.
     

Chapter 3
     

     
    O ne night while I was poking around under BARGAINS, I noticed a crude hole in the masonry where a large black pipe came out of the wall. It snaked across the floor and slithered into the opposite wall under RESTROOM. There were no shelves against that wall, just a door, and that was always closed. I poked my nose into the hole and sniffed. It smelled of rats. The pipe entered the wall and then turned and ran straight up. Though it was a very big pipe, it did not entirely fill the hole that had been made for it, and the masonry all around it was rough and jagged. I had a lot of curiosity in those days, and the smell was reassuring, though it was not exactly like the rat smells I was used to. It was sadder than those.
     
    Bracing my back against the pipe, I placed my feet against the side of the hole and hauled myself up using the jagged bits of masonry as toeholds. It was a fairly easy climb. At the top, at a level corresponding to the baseboards on the first floor, the tunnel branched. One path went on up along the pipe, while others snaked left and right along the base of the wall between the plaster laths and the exterior masonry. That night I went left. The next night I went right. And in a week I had a map of the whole system in my head. The building was veined with tunnels, a regular honeycomb, a twisting, back-looping warren. If I were not in such a hurry - there is almost no more time - I could at this point launch into an interminable description of the whole tunnel system, which obviously had been constructed by the cooperative labor of thousands of rats long before my time, generations of them grinding their incisors to stubs just so I, Firmin, could one day travel undetected to every point in the building. I could break your ears talking about shafts, chutes, scopes, and drifts, about the difference between a raise and a winze, and if anybody was still awake I could put him to sleep with glory holes, scrapers, dippers, man-ladders, and footwalls. If you enjoy that sort of description, you should get a book on mining.
     
    At first I expected to bump