Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Abridged Page 17

  CHAPTER 2

  My father lay stretched across the bed as still as if the hand of death had pushed him down, for a full hour and a half, before he began to play upon the floor with the foot which hung over the bed-side; my uncle Toby’s heart was lighter for it.

  In a few moments, his left-hand, which had all the time reclined upon the handle of the chamber-pot, thrust it a little more under the bed – he drew up his hand – gave a hem! My good uncle Toby, with infinite pleasure, answered it; and gladly would have added a sentence of consolation: but having no talents that way, and fearing that he might say something to make a bad matter worse, he contented himself with resting his chin placidly upon the cross of his crutch.

  Now whether the compression shortened my uncle Toby’s face into a more pleasurable oval – or whether the philanthropy of his heart braced up his muscles, doubling the benignity which was there before, is not hard to decide. My father, in turning his eyes, was struck with such a gleam of sunshine in his face, as melted the sullenness of his grief in a moment.

  He broke silence as follows.

  CHAPTER 3

  ‘Did ever man, brother Toby,’ cried my father, raising himself upon his elbow, and turning to face my uncle, who was sitting in his old fringed chair, with his chin resting upon his crutch – ‘did ever a poor unfortunate man receive so many lashes?’

  ‘The most I ever saw given,’ quoth my uncle Toby (ringing the bell for Trim) ‘was to a grenadier, I think in Mackay’s regiment.’

  Had my uncle Toby shot a bullet through my father’s heart, he could not have fallen down with his nose upon the quilt more suddenly.

  ‘Bless me!’ said my uncle Toby.

  CHAPTER 4

  ‘Was it Mackay’s regiment,’ quoth my uncle Toby, ‘where the poor grenadier was so unmercifully whipped about the ducats?’

  ‘O Christ! he was innocent!’ cried Trim, with a deep sigh. ‘And he was whipped, your honour, almost to death’s door.’

  ‘I thank thee, Trim,’ quoth my uncle Toby.

  ‘I never think of it,’ continued Trim, ‘and my poor brother Tom’s misfortunes – for we were all school-fellows – without crying like a coward.’

  ‘Tears are no proof of cowardice, Trim. I drop them often myself,’ cried my uncle Toby.

  ‘I know your honour does,’ replied Trim, ‘and so am not ashamed of it. – But to think of two virtuous lads with hearts as warm and honest as God could make them – going forth with gallant spirits to seek their fortunes – and falling into such evils! poor Tom! to be tortured upon a rack for nothing but marrying a Jew’s widow who sold sausages – and honest Dick Johnson’s soul to be scourged out of his body, for the ducats another man put into his knapsack! O! these are misfortunes, your honour, worth lying down and crying over.’

  My father could not help blushing.

  ‘’Twould be a pity, Trim,’ quoth my uncle Toby, ‘if thou shouldst ever feel sorrow of thy own – thou feelest it so tenderly for others.’

  ‘Alack-o-day,’ replied the corporal, brightening up, ‘your honour knows I have neither wife or child – I can have no sorrows in this world.’ My father could not help smiling.

  ‘As few as any man, Trim,’ replied my uncle Toby; ‘yet thou couldst suffer from the distress of poverty in thy old age, when thou hast outlived thy friends.’

  ‘Never fear, your honour,’ replied Trim cheerily.

  ‘But I would have thee never fear, Trim,’ replied my uncle; ‘and therefore’ – standing up – ‘therefore in recompense of thy long fidelity to me, and the goodness of thy heart – thou shalt never ask elsewhere, Trim, for a penny.’

  Trim attempted to thank my uncle Toby – but tears trickled down his cheeks faster than he could wipe them off. He laid his hands upon his breast – made a bow, and shut the door.

  ‘I have left Trim my bowling-green,’ cried my uncle Toby. – My father smiled.

  ‘I have left him moreover a pension,’ continued my uncle Toby. – My father looked grave.

  CHAPTER 5

  Is this a fit time, said my father to himself, to talk of Pensions and Grenadiers?

  CHAPTER 6

  When my uncle Toby first mentioned the grenadier, my father, I said, fell down with his nose flat to the quilt, as suddenly as if shot; but I did not add that every other limb of my father instantly relapsed into the same attitude in which he lay first described; so that when corporal Trim left the room, and my father wanted to rise off the bed – he had all the little preparatory movements to run over again.

  Attitudes are nothing, madam – ’tis the transition from one attitude to another, like the resolution of the discord into harmony, which is all in all.

  My father played the same jig with his toe upon the floor – pushed the chamber-pot a little farther underneath the bed – gave a hem – raised himself upon his elbow – and was just beginning to address my uncle Toby – when, recollecting the unsuccessfulness of his first effort in that attitude, he stood, and making a turn across the room, he stopped before my uncle. He addressed him then as follows:

  CHAPTER 7

  ‘When I reflect, brother Toby, upon Man, and the many troubles he is open to – when I consider how oft we eat the bread of affliction, and that we are born to it, as to our inheritance–’

  ‘I was born to nothing,’ quoth my uncle, interrupting, ‘but my commission.’

  ‘Zooks!’ said my father; ‘did not my uncle leave you a hundred and twenty pounds a year?’

  ‘What could I have done without it?’ replied my uncle Toby.

  ‘That’s another matter,’ said my father testily. ‘But I say, Toby, when one runs over the catalogue of all the sorrows with which the heart of man is overcharged, ’tis wonderful how the mind can bear itself up, as it does.’

  ‘’Tis by the assistance of Almighty God,’ cried my uncle Toby. ‘’Tis not from our own strength, brother Shandy – a sentinel might as well pretend to stand against fifty men. We are upheld by the grace of the best of Beings.’

  ‘That is cutting the knot,’ said my father, ‘instead of untying it. But allow me to lead you, brother, a little deeper into the mystery.’

  ‘With all my heart,’ replied my uncle.

  My father instantly took up the attitude in which Socrates is so finely painted by Raphael; which your connoisseurship knows is so exquisitely imagined, that even the particular manner of the reasoning of Socrates is expressed by it – for he holds the forefinger of his left hand between the forefinger and the thumb of his right.

  So stood my father, holding his forefinger betwixt his finger and his thumb, and reasoning with my uncle Toby in his old fringed chair with woollen bobs – O Garrick! what a rich scene wouldst thou make of this! and how gladly would I write such another to secure my immortality.

  CHAPTER 8

  ‘Though man is so curious a vehicle,’ said my father, ‘yet his frame is so slight, and so totteringly put together, that the sudden jostlings it unavoidably meets with in this rugged journey, would tear it to pieces a dozen times a day – were it not, brother Toby, that there is a secret spring within us.’

  ‘I take it you mean Religion,’ said my uncle Toby.

  ‘Will that set my child’s nose on?’ cried my father, letting go his finger.

  ‘It makes everything straight for us,’ answered my uncle Toby.

  ‘Figuratively speaking, dear Toby, it may,’ said my father; ‘but the spring I am speaking of, is that great power within us of counterbalancing evil, which, like a secret spring in a well-ordered machine, though it can’t prevent the shock – at least it deadens our sense of it.

  ‘Now, my dear brother,’ continued my father, replacing his forefinger, ‘if my child had arrived safe into the world, with his nose intact – fanciful as I may appear in my opinion of christian names, and of that magic bias which good or bad names impress upon our characters – Heaven is witness! in my warmest wishes for my child, I never wished to crown his head with more glory and ho
nour than George or Edward would have bestowed on him. But alas! as the greatest evil has befallen him – I must counteract it with the greatest good. He shall be christened Trismegistus.’

  ‘I wish it may help,’ replied my uncle Toby.

  CHAPTER 9

  ‘What a chapter of chances,’ said my father, turning on the first landing, as he and my uncle Toby were going downstairs – ‘what a long chapter of chances do the events of this world lay open to us! Take pen in hand, brother Toby, and calculate it.’

  ‘I know no more of calculation than this banister,’ said my uncle Toby (attempting to strike it with his crutch, and hitting my father a blow upon his shin-bone). ‘’Twas a hundred to one chance,’ cried my uncle.

  ‘I thought,’ quoth my father (rubbing his shin), ‘you knew nothing of calculations, brother.’

  The success of my father’s repartee tickled off the pain of his shin. It was well it happened (chance! again) – or the world would never have known the subject of my father’s calculation – there was no chance of guessing it–

  What a lucky chapter of chances has this turned out! for it has saved me the trouble of writing one especially, and in truth I have enough already upon my hands without it. Have I not promised the world a chapter of knots? two chapters upon the right and wrong end of a woman? a chapter upon whiskers? a chapter upon wishes? a chapter of noses? No, I have done that. A chapter upon my uncle Toby’s modesty? to say nothing of a chapter upon chapters, which I will finish before I sleep. By my great-grandfather’s whiskers, I shall never get through half of ’em this year.

  ‘Take pen in hand, and calculate it,’ said my father, ‘and it will turn out a million to one, that of all the parts of the body, the forceps should have the ill luck just to break that part, which should destroy the fortunes of our house with it.’

  ‘It might have been worse,’ replied my uncle Toby. ‘Suppose the hip had presented, as Dr. Slop foreboded.’

  My father reflected half a minute–

  ‘True,’ said he.

  CHAPTER 10

  Is it not a shame to make two chapters of what passed in going down one pair of stairs? for we are got no farther yet than the first landing, and there are fifteen more steps down to the bottom; and for aught I know, as my father and my uncle Toby are in a talking mood, there may be as many chapters as steps.

  – A sudden impulse comes across me – drop the curtain, Shandy – I drop it – and hey for a new chapter.

  If I had a rule to govern this affair – as I do all things out of rule, I would tear it to pieces, and throw it into the fire. Is a man to follow rules – or are rules to follow him?

  Now this, you must know, being my chapter upon chapters, which I promised to write before I went to sleep, I thought I should ease my conscience by telling the world all I knew about the matter at once. Is not this ten times better than setting out with a parade of wisdom, and saying that chapters relieve the mind – assist the reader – and that in a work of this dramatic cast they are as necessary as the scene-shifting?

  O! but to understand this, you must read Longinus – if you are no wiser after that, never fear, read him again – Avicenna and Licetus read Aristotle’s metaphysics forty times, and never understood a single word. But mark the consequence – Avicenna turned out a desperate writer; and as for Licetus, though all the world knows he was born a foetus of only five inches and a half in length, yet he grew to such astonishing height in literature as to write a book with a title as long as himself – the learned know I mean his Gonopsychanthropologia, upon the origin of the human soul.

  So much for my chapter upon chapters, which I hold to be the best chapter in my whole work.

  CHAPTER 11

  ‘We shall bring all things to rights,’ said my father, setting his foot upon the first step from the landing.

  ‘This Trismegistus,’ he continued, drawing his leg back and turning to my uncle Toby, ‘was the greatest king – the greatest law-giver – philosopher – and the greatest priest–’

  ‘– and engineer.’ said my uncle Toby.

  ‘Of course,’ said my father.

  CHAPTER 12

  ‘And how does your mistress?’ cried my father, calling from the landing to Susannah, whom he saw passing the foot of the stairs with a huge pincushion in her hand.

  Susannah, without looking up, said, ‘As well as can be expected.’

  ‘What a fool am I!’ said my father, drawing his leg back again. ‘’Tis ever the answer. – And how is the child, pray?’ – No reply. – ‘And where is Dr. Slop?’ added my father, raising his voice, and looking over the banisters. – Susannah was out of hearing.

  ‘Of all the riddles of a married life,’ said my father, crossing the landing to set his back against the wall, ‘of all the puzzling riddles, of which, brother Toby, there are more loads than all Job’s asses could have carried – there is none more puzzling than this – that from the very moment the mistress of the house is brought to bed, every female in it, right down to the kitchen-maid, becomes an inch taller for it; and gives themselves more airs upon that single inch, than all their other inches put together.’

  ‘I think rather,’ replied my uncle Toby, ‘that ’tis we who sink an inch lower. If I meet a woman with child, I do it. ’Tis a heavy tax upon that half of our fellow-creatures, brother Shandy – ’tis a piteous burden upon ’em,’ continued he, shaking his head.

  ‘Yes, yes, ’tis a painful thing,’ said my father, shaking his head too – but never did two heads shake together, from two such different causes.

  ‘God bless / Deuce take ’em all,’ said my uncle Toby / and my father, each to himself.

  CHAPTER 13

  Holla! here’s sixpence – do step into that bookseller’s shop, and get me a day-tall critic. I am very willing to give any one of ’em a crown to help me get my father and my uncle Toby off the stairs, and put them to bed.

  ’Tis high time; for except for a short nap, which they had whilst Trim was boring the jack-boots – which nap, by the bye, did my father no good, because of the bad hinge – they have not shut their eyes since nine hours before Dr. Slop was led into the back parlour by Obadiah.

  Was every day of my life to be as busy as this – Truce.

  I will not finish that sentence till I have made an observation upon the strange state of affairs between the reader and myself – an observation that never applied before to any biographical writer in the world, but me – and therefore, for its novelty alone, it must be worth your worships attending to.

  I am this month one whole year older than I was this time twelve months ago; and having got, as you see, almost into the middle of my fourth volume, and no farther than my first day of life – therefore I have three hundred and sixty-four days more life to write now, than when I first set out; so that instead of advancing, as a common writer, in my work – on the contrary, I am just thrown so many volumes back.

  If every day of my life was as busy as this – and my opinions were to take up as much description – and why should they be cut short? – at this rate I should just live 364 times faster than I write. It must follow that the more I write, the more I shall have to write – and consequently, the more your worships read, the more your worships will have to read.

  Was it not that my Opinions will be the death of me, I shall lead a fine life out of this life of mine; or, rather shall lead a couple of fine lives together.

  As for the proposal of twelve volumes a year, it no way alters my prospect – rush as I may, I shall never overtake myself; at the worst I shall have one day’s head start of my pen – and one day is enough for two volumes – and two volumes will be enough for one year.

  Heaven prosper the manufacturers of paper under this propitious reign.

  As for Geese and their quills – I have no concern. Nature is bountiful – I shall never lack tools to work with.

  So then, friend! you have got my father and my uncle off the stairs, and seen them to bed? How did you m
anage it? You dropped a curtain at the stair-foot. – Here’s a crown for your trouble.

  CHAPTER 14

  ‘Then reach me my breeches off the chair,’ said my father to Susannah.

  ‘There is no time to dress you, Sir,’ cried Susannah; ‘the child is as black in the face as my–’

  ‘As your what?’ said my father.

  ‘Bless me, Sir,’ said Susannah, ‘the child’s in a fit.’

  ‘And where’s Mr. Yorick?’

  ‘Never where he should be,’ said Susannah, ‘but his curate’s in the dressing-room, with the child upon his arm, waiting for the name – and my mistress bid me run as fast as I could to know, since Captain Shandy is the godfather, whether it should be called after him.’

  ‘If one were sure,’ said my father to himself, scratching his eyebrow, ‘that the child was expiring, one might as well compliment my brother Toby – and it would be a pity, in that case, to throw away so great a name as Trismegistus upon him – but he may recover. No, no,’ he said to Susannah. ‘I’ll get up.’

  ‘There is no time,’ cried Susannah, ‘the child’s as black as my shoe.’

  ‘Trismegistus,’ said my father. ‘But stay – thou art a leaky vessel, Susannah. Canst thou carry Trismegistus in thy head, the length of the gallery without scattering it?’

  ‘Can I?’ cried Susannah, shutting the door in a huff.

  ‘If she can, I’ll be shot,’ said my father, bouncing out of bed in the dark, and groping for his clothes.

  Susannah ran with all speed along the gallery.

  My father made all possible speed to find his breeches.

  ‘’Tis Tris – something,’ cried Susannah.

  ‘There is no christian-name in the world,’ said the curate, ‘beginning with Tris, but Tristram.’

  ‘Then ’tis Tristram-gistus,’ quoth Susannah.

  ‘There is no gistus to it, noodle! – ’tis my own name,’ replied the curate, dipping his hand into the basin. ‘Tristram!’ said he, &c. &c. &c.; so Tristram was I called, and Tristram shall I be to the day of my death.