The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman - Laurence Sterne [102]
———Lead me, brother Toby, cried my father, to my room this instant.
CHAP. XXVIII
From the first moment I sat down to write my life for the amusement of the world, and my opinions for its instruction, has a cloud insensibly been gathering over my father.——A tide of little evils and distresses has been setting in against him.——Not one thing, as he observed himself, has gone right: and now is the storm thicken’d, and going to break, and pour down full upon his head.
I enter upon this part of my story in the most pensive and melancholy frame of mind, that ever sympathetic breast was touched with.———My nerves relax as I tell it.———Every line I write, I feel an abatement of the quickness of my pulse, and of that careless alacrity with it, which every day of my life prompts me to say and write a thousand things I should not.——And this moment that I last dipp’d my pen into my ink, I could not help taking notice what a cautious air of sad composure and solemnity there appear’d in my manner of doing it.——Lord! how different from the rash jerks, and hare-brain’d squirts thou art wont, Tristram! to transact it with in other humours,——dropping thy pen,—spurting thy ink about thy table and thy books,—as if thy pen and thy ink, thy books and thy furniture cost thee nothing.
CHAP. XXIX
——I won’t go about to argue the point with you,—’tis so,—and I am persuaded of it, madam, as much as can be, “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 up into his chamber, he threw himself prostrate across his bed in the wildest disorder imaginable, but at the same time, in the most lamentable attitude of a man borne down with sorrows, that ever the eye of pity dropp’d a tear for.——The palm of his right hand, as he fell upon the bed, receiving his forehead, and covering the greatest part of both his eyes, gently sunk down with his head (his elbow giving way backwards) till his nose touch’d the quilt;——his left arm hung insensible over the side of the bed, his knuckles reclining upon the handle of the chamber pot, which peep’d out beyond the valance,—his right leg (his left being drawn up towards his body) hung half over the side of the bed, the edge of it pressing upon his shin-bone.——He felt it not. A fix’d, inflexible sorrow took possession of every line of his face.—He sigh’d once,——heaved his breast often,—but utter’d not a word.
An old set-stitch’d chair, valanced and fringed around with party-colour’d worsted bobs, stood at the bed’s head, opposite to the side where my father’s head reclined.——My uncle Toby sat him down in it.
Before an affliction is digested,——consolation ever comes too soon;——and after it is digested,—it comes too late: so that you see, madam, there is but a mark between these two, as fine almost 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 would often say, He believed in his heart, he could as soon hit the longitude;1 for this reason, when he sat down in the chair, he drew the curtain a little forwards, and having a tear at every one’s service,—he pull’d out a cambrick handkerchief,—gave a low sigh,——but held his peace.
CHAP. XXX
——“All is not gain that is got into the purse.”1——So that notwithstanding my father had the happiness of reading the oddest books in the universe, and had moreover, in himself, the oddest way of thinking, that ever man in it was bless’d with, yet it had this drawback upon him after all,——that it laid him open to some of the oddest and most whimsical distresses; of which this particular one which he sunk under at present is as strong an example as can be given.
No doubt, the breaking down of the bridge of a child’s nose, by the edge of a pair of forceps,—however scientifically applied,——would vex any man in the world, who was at so much pains in begetting a child,