Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Abridged

by Emma Laybourn

  Now, for the clearer illustration of this matter, let us take off one of these two curious ornaments (I care not which) from the chair. Nay, don’t laugh – but did you ever see such a ridiculous business as this has made of it? Why, ’tis as miserable a sight as a sow with one ear. Would any self-respecting craftsman turn out a piece of work in such a condition?

  Nay, answer me this question: whether this one single knob, which now stands here like a blockhead by itself, can serve any purpose but to remind one of the lack of the other? Would it not be ten times better without any knob at all?

  Now these two knobs being, as I said, wit and judgment, which as I have proved, are most needful, and hard to come at – there is not a mortal among us who does not wish to be, or to be thought at least, master of them both.

  Now your graver gentry having little or no chance in aiming at the one unless they had the other – pray what do you think would become of them? Why, Sirs, in spite of all their gravities, their only recourse would be to snatch up and secrete what they could under their cloaks and great periwigs; raising a hue and cry at the same time against the lawful owners.

  I need not tell your worships, that even the great Locke was tricked by this means. With the help of vast wigs and grave faces, their deep and solemn cry deceived the philosopher. Instead of sitting down coolly to examine the matter, he took the fact for granted, and joined in the cry as boisterously as the rest.

  As for great wigs, upon which I may have spoken my mind too freely – I declare that I do not detest either great wigs or long beards, except when I see them grown on purpose to carry on this imposture. Peace be with them! mark only – I write not for them.

  CHAPTER 21

  Every day for at least ten years my father resolved to have it mended – ’tis not mended yet; no other family would have borne with it an hour – and what is most astonishing, there was not a subject in the world upon which my father was so eloquent, as that of door-hinges. And yet his speech and actions were at perpetual handy-cuffs. Never did the parlour-door open, without his philosophy felling victim to it; yet three drops of oil, and a smart stroke of a hammer, would have solved it for ever.

  Inconsistent soul that man is! languishing under wounds which he has the power to heal! – his whole life a contradiction to his knowledge! Poor unhappy creature! Are there not enough causes of misery in this life? Yet he adds more; he struggles against evils which cannot be avoided, and submits to others, which a tiny effort would remove.

  By all that is virtuous, if there are three drops of oil to be got, and a hammer to be found within ten miles of Shandy Hall – the parlour door hinge shall be mended in this reign.

  CHAPTER 22

  When Corporal Trim had finished making his two mortars, he was delighted with his handy-work; and knowing how pleased his master would be to see them, he could not resist carrying them directly into the parlour.

  Now besides the moral lesson I gave in the affair of hinges, I had another reason for mentioning it.

  Had the parlour door opened and turned upon its hinges, as a door should do–

  For example, as cleverly as our government has been turning upon its hinges – in this case, there would have been no danger in Corporal Trim’s peeping in: the moment he had beheld my father and my uncle Toby fast asleep, he would have respectfully retired in silence and left them both in their armchairs, dreaming happily.

  However, during the many years in which this hinge was out of order, amongst the hourly grievances my father held about it, was this one; that he never folded his arms to take his nap after dinner, without thinking that he would be unavoidably awakened by the first person who should open the door. This thought so often stepped in betwixt him and his balmy repose, as to rob him, as he declared, of the enjoyment of it.

  ‘Pray what’s the matter? Who is there?’ cried my father, waking the moment the door began to creak. ‘I wish the smith would look at that confounded hinge.’

  ‘’Tis nothing, your honour,’ said Trim, ‘but two mortars I am bringing in.’

  ‘Don’t make a clatter with them here,’ cried my father. ‘If Dr. Slop has drugs to pound, let him do it in the kitchen.’

  ‘May it please your honour,’ cried Trim, ‘they are two mortar-pieces for a siege next summer, which I have been making out of a pair of jack-boots, which Obadiah told me your honour had stopped wearing.’

  ‘By Heaven!’ cried my father, springing out of his chair. ‘I have nothing which I value so much as those jack-boots – they were our great grandfather’s, they are an inheritance.’

  ‘Then I fear,’ quoth my uncle Toby, ‘that Trim has cut off the entail.’

  ‘I have only cut off the tops, your honour,’ cried Trim.

  ‘These jack-boots,’ cried my father, (smiling, though very angry at the same time) ‘have been in the family, brother, ever since the civil wars. Sir Roger Shandy wore them at the battle of Marston-Moor. I declare I would not have taken ten pounds for them.’

  ‘I’ll pay you the money, brother,’ quoth my uncle Toby, looking at the two mortars with infinite pleasure, and putting his hand into his breeches pocket.

  ‘Brother Toby,’ replied my father, ‘you care not what money you throw away, provided ’tis upon a Siege.’

  ‘Have I not one hundred and twenty pounds a year, besides my half pay?’ cried my uncle Toby.

  ‘What is that,’ replied my father, ‘to ten pounds for a pair of jack-boots? Twelve guineas for your pontoons? Half as much for your Dutch draw-bridge? – to say nothing of the train of brass artillery you ordered last week, with twenty other preparations for the siege of Messina. Believe me, dear brother,’ continued my father, taking him kindly by the hand, ‘these military operations carry you into greater expenses than you were first aware of; and my dear Toby, they will in the end make a beggar of you.’

  ‘What does it matter, brother,’ replied my uncle Toby, ‘so long as we know ’tis for the good of the nation?’

  My father could not help smiling – his anger was never more than a spark; and the zeal and simplicity of Trim, and the generous (though hobby-horsical) gallantry of my uncle Toby, brought him into perfect good humour with them both.

  ‘Generous souls! God prosper you, and your mortar-pieces!’ quoth he to himself.

  CHAPTER 23

  ‘All is quiet and hush above stairs,’ cried my father; ‘I hear not one foot stirring. Prithee, Trim, who’s in the kitchen?’

  ‘Not a soul,’ answered Trim, ‘except Dr. Slop.’

  ‘Confusion!’ cried my father, getting to his feet; ‘not one thing has gone right this day! If I believed in astrology’ (which, by the bye, my father did), ‘I would have sworn some retrograde planet was hanging over this unfortunate house, and turning everything out of its place. Why, I thought Dr. Slop was upstairs with my wife. What can the fellow be puzzling about in the kitchen?’

  ‘He is busy, your honour,’ replied Trim, ‘in making a bridge.’

  ‘’Tis very obliging in him,’ quoth my uncle Toby: ‘pray tell him I thank him heartily.’

  My uncle Toby mistook the bridge as widely as my father mistook the mortars; – but to understand this, I fear I must give you an exact account of the road which led to the mistake; or at least I must give you some account of an adventure of Trim’s, though much against my will; I say much against my will, because the story is certainly out of its place here; for by rights it should come either amongst the anecdotes of my uncle Toby’s amours with widow Wadman, or else in Trim’s and my uncle Toby’s campaigns on the bowling-green; but then if I reserve it for either of those parts of my story, I ruin the story I’m upon; – and if I tell it here, I anticipate matters, and ruin it there.

  What would your worships have me do in this case?

  – Tell it, Mr. Shandy, by all means.

  – You are a fool, Tristram, if you do.

  O ye powers which enable mortal man to tell a story worth the hearing – that kindly show him where to b
egin and where to end it – what to put in and what to leave out! Ye, who preside over this vast empire of biographical freebooters, and see how many scrapes your subjects hourly fall into – will you do one thing?

  I beg and beseech you that wherever three different roads meet in one point, as they have done just here – that you set up a guide-post in the centre of them, in mere charity, to direct an uncertain devil which road he is to take.

  CHAPTER 24

  Though the shock my uncle Toby received in his affair with widow Wadman made him resolve never more to think of the female sex, yet corporal Trim had made no such bargain with himself.

  In my uncle Toby’s case there was a strange and unaccountable meeting of circumstances, which drew him in to lay siege to that fair citadel. In Trim’s case there was a meeting of nothing, but of him and Bridget in the kitchen. When my uncle Toby sat down before the widow, corporal Trim stood before the maid.

  After a series of attacks and repulses by my uncle Toby over nine months, a most minute account of which shall be given in its proper place, my uncle Toby, honest man! found it necessary to draw off his forces and raise the siege somewhat indignantly.

  Corporal Trim, as I said, had made no such bargain with himself. However, his faithful heart not allowing him to go into a house which his master had forsaken with disgust – he contented himself with a blockade; – that is, he kept others off. For though he never went to the house, when he met Bridget in the village, it was with a nod, or a smile; he would shake her hand – or ask her lovingly how she did – or give her a ribbon – and now-and-then, though only when it could be done with decorum, would give her a –

  Things stood in this situation for five years; from the demolition of Dunkirk in 1713, to the end of my uncle Toby’s campaign in 1718. Trim, after he had put my uncle Toby to bed as usual, was going one moonshiny night to see that everything was right at his fortifications, when in the lane separated from the bowling-green with flowering shrubs he espied his Bridget.

  As the corporal thought there was nothing in the world so well worth showing her as the glorious works which he and my uncle Toby had made, he courteously took her hand, and led her in.

  But the foul-mouthed trumpet of Fame carried a report of this from ear to ear, till at length it reached my father – along with this strange circumstance, that my uncle Toby’s Dutch drawbridge, which went across the ditch, was somehow broken and crushed all to pieces that very night.

  My father, as you have observed, had no great esteem for my uncle Toby’s hobby-horse; he thought it the most ridiculous horse that ever gentleman mounted. So this accident tickled my father’s imagination beyond measure, and proved an inexhaustible fund of entertainment to him.

  ‘Well – dear Toby!’ my father would say, ‘do tell me how this affair of the bridge happened.’

  ‘How can you tease me so about it?’ my uncle Toby would reply. ‘I have told you twenty times, word for word as Trim told me.’

  ‘Prithee, how was it then, corporal?’ my father would cry, turning to Trim.

  ‘It was a mere misfortune, your honour; I was showing Mrs. Bridget our fortifications, and going too near the edge of the ditch, I unfortunately slipped in. And being linked arm in arm with Mrs. Bridget, I dragged her after me, and she fell backwards against the bridge–’

  ‘– and Trim’s foot’ (my uncle Toby would cry) ‘getting into the cuvette, he tumbled against the bridge too. It was fortunate that the poor fellow did not break his leg.’

  ‘Ay truly,’ my father would say, ‘a limb is soon broke in such encounters.’

  ‘And so, your honour, the bridge, which was a very slight one, was broke down betwixt us, and splintered all to pieces.’

  At other times, when my uncle Toby was so unfortunate as to say a syllable about cannons or bombs, my father would expound upon the Battering-Rams of the ancients. – He would tell my uncle Toby of the Syrian Catapults, which threw such monstrous stones so many hundred feet, that they shook the strongest bulwarks to their very foundation: he would describe the wonderful mechanism of the Ballista – the terrible effects of the fire-hurling Pyroboli – the danger of the Terebra and Scorpio.

  ‘But what are these,’ he would say, ‘to the destructive machinery of corporal Trim? No bridge that ever was constructed can hold out against such artillery.’

  My uncle Toby would never attempt any defence against this ridicule, except by smoking his pipe with redoubled vehemence. In doing this, he raised so dense a smoke one night, that it set my father into a fit of violent coughing.

  My uncle Toby leaped up without feeling the pain in his groin – and, with infinite pity, stood beside his brother, tapping his back, and holding his head, and from time to time wiping his eyes with a clean handkerchief. The affectionate manner in which he did this cut my father to the quick for the pain he had just been giving him.

  ‘May my brains be knocked out with a battering-ram,’ quoth my father to himself, ‘if ever I insult this worthy soul again!’

  CHAPTER 25

  The draw-bridge being irreparable, Trim was ordered to start another – but not upon the same model: for my uncle Toby rightly foreseeing that warfare would break out betwixt Spain and the Empire, and that the campaign must in all likelihood be in Naples or Sicily, he determined upon an Italian bridge.

  When Corporal Trim had about half finished it, my uncle Toby found a defect which he had never considered before. The draw-bridge turned upon hinges at both ends, opening in the middle, one half turning to one side of the fosse, and the other to the other.

  The advantage of this was, that by dividing the weight of the bridge into two equal portions, it allowed my uncle to raise it up or let it down with the end of his crutch; but the disadvantages were great – ‘for by this means,’ he would say, ‘I leave one half of my bridge in my enemy’s possession, and pray of what use is the other?’

  The natural remedy for this was to have his bridge fastened only at one end with hinges, so that the whole might be lifted up together, and stand bolt upright – but that would require too much strength to operate.

  For a whole week, my uncle Toby was determined to have one constructed to draw back horizontally, to hinder a passage; and to thrust forwards again to gain a passage – but on my father advising him earnestly to have nothing more to do with thrusting bridges, he changed his mind for that of the marquis d’Hôpital’s invention: with a lead weight as an eternal balance, constructed in a curve approximating to a cycloid – if not a cycloid itself.

  My uncle Toby understood the nature of a parabola as well as any man in England, but was not quite such a master of the cycloid.

  ‘We’ll ask somebody about it,’ he cried to Trim.

  CHAPTER 26

  When Trim came in and told my father that Dr. Slop was in the kitchen, busy making a bridge, my uncle Toby took it instantly for granted that Dr. Slop was making a model of the marquis d’Hôpital’s bridge.

  ‘’Tis very obliging in him,’ quoth he; ‘pray tell him I thank him heartily.’

  Had my uncle Toby’s head been a Savoyard’s peep-show box, with my father peeping in at one end – it could not have given him a clearer picture of my uncle Toby’s imagination; so he was beginning to triumph–

  When Trim’s answer, the next instant, tore the laurel from his brows, and twisted it to pieces.

  CHAPTER 27

  ‘This unfortunate draw-bridge of yours–’ began my father.

  ‘God bless your honour,’ cried Trim, ‘’tis a bridge for the baby’s nose. In bringing him into the world with his vile instruments, he has crushed his nose, Susannah says, as flat as a pancake, and he is making a bridge with cotton and a thin piece of whalebone out of Susannah’s corset, to raise it up.’

  ‘Lead me, brother Toby,’ cried my father, ‘to my room this instant.’

  CHAPTER 28

  From the first moment I sat down to write this for the amusement and instruction of the world, a cloud has been slowly gathe
ring over my father. A tide of little evils and distresses has been setting in against him. – Not one thing, as he observed, has gone right: and now is the storm going to break and pour down full upon his head.

  I enter upon this part of my story in a most pensive and melancholy frame of mind. Just now, when I dipped my pen into my ink, I could not help noticing with what a cautious, sad and solemn air I did it. – Lord! how different from the rash and hair-brained squirts thou art wont, Tristram, to use in other moods – dropping thy pen – spurting thy ink about thy table and books – as if they cost thee nothing!

  CHAPTER 29

  I am persuaded, madam, ‘That both man and woman bear pain or sorrow (and, for aught I know, pleasure too) best in a horizontal position.’

  The moment my father got into his chamber, he wildly threw himself prostrate across the bed in the attitude of a man borne down with sorrows. – The palm of his right hand covering both his eyes, he gently sunk down till his nose touched the quilt; his left arm hung over the side of the bed, his knuckles reclining upon the handle of the chamber-pot – his right leg dangled half over the bed, the edge of it pressing on his shin-bone.

  – He felt it not. Sorrow took possession of every line of his face. He sighed once – heaved his breast often – but uttered not a word.

  An old chair, fringed with woollen bobs, stood at the bed’s head. My uncle Toby sat down in it.

  Before an affliction is digested, consolation always comes too soon; and after it is digested – it comes too late: so that you see, madam, there is only a mark between these two as fine as a hair, for a comforter to take aim at. My uncle Toby was always either on this side, or on that of it, and did not believe he could hit the mark; therefore, when he sat down, he drew the curtain a little, pulled out a handkerchief – gave a low sigh – but held his peace.

  CHAPTER 30

  ‘All is not gain that is got into the purse.’ Although my father had read the oddest books in the universe, and had moreover the oddest way of thinking that ever man was blessed with, yet it had this drawback – that it laid him open to some of the oddest and most whimsical distresses; of which this is as strong an example as can be given.