3 Books By Laurence Sterne. Laurence Sterne

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СКАЧАТЬ Trim, with humble submission to your Honour's better judgment,--that these ravelins, bastions, curtins, and hornworks, make but a poor, contemptible, fiddle-faddle piece of work of it here upon paper, compared to what your Honour and I could make of it were we in the country by ourselves, and had but a rood, or a rood and a half of ground to do what we pleased with: As summer is coming on, continued Trim, your Honour might sit out of doors, and give me the nography--(Call it ichnography, quoth my uncle,)--of the town or citadel, your Honour was pleased to sit down before,--and I will be shot by your Honour upon the glacis of it, if I did not fortify it to your Honour's mind.--I dare say thou would'st, Trim, quoth my uncle.--For if your Honour, continued the Corporal, could but mark me the polygon, with its exact lines and angles--That I could do very well, quoth my uncle.--I would begin with the fosse, and if your Honour could tell me the proper depth and breadth--I can to a hair's breadth, Trim, replied my uncle.--I would throw out the earth upon this hand towards the town for the scarp,--and on that hand towards the campaign for the counterscarp.--Very right, Trim, quoth my uncle Toby:--And when I had sloped them to your mind,--an' please your Honour, I would face the glacis, as the finest fortifications are done in Flanders, with sods,--and as your Honour knows they should be,--and I would make the walls and parapets with sods too.--The best engineers call them gazons, Trim, said my uncle Toby.--Whether they are gazons or sods, is not much matter, replied Trim; your Honour knows they are ten times beyond a facing either of brick or stone.--I know they are, Trim in some respects,--quoth my uncle Toby, nodding his head;--for a cannon-ball enters into the gazon right onwards, without bringing any rubbish down with it, which might fill the fosse, (as was the case at St. Nicolas's gate) and facilitate the passage over it.

      Your Honour understands these matters, replied Corporal Trim, better than any officer in his Majesty's service;--but would your Honour please to let the bespeaking of the table alone, and let us but go into the country, I would work under your Honour's directions like a horse, and make fortifications for you something like a tansy, with all their batteries, saps, ditches, and palisadoes, that it should be worth all the world's riding twenty miles to go and see it.

      My uncle Toby blushed as red as scarlet as Trim went on;--but it was not a blush of guilt,--of modesty,--or of anger,--it was a blush of joy;--he was fired with Corporal Trim's project and description.--Trim! said my uncle Toby, thou hast said enough.--We might begin the campaign, continued Trim, on the very day that his Majesty and the Allies take the field, and demolish them town by town as fast as--Trim, quoth my uncle Toby, say no more. Your Honour, continued Trim, might sit in your arm-chair (pointing to it) this fine weather, giving me your orders, and I would--Say no more, Trim, quoth my uncle Toby--Besides, your Honour would get not only pleasure and good pastime--but good air, and good exercise, and good health,--and your Honour's wound would be well in a month. Thou hast said enough, Trim,--quoth my uncle Toby (putting his hand into his breeches-pocket)--I like thy project mightily.--And if your Honour pleases, I'll this moment go and buy a pioneer's spade to take down with us, and I'll bespeak a shovel and a pick-axe, and a couple of--Say no more, Trim, quoth my uncle Toby, leaping up upon one leg, quite overcome with rapture,--and thrusting a guinea into Trim's hand,--Trim, said my uncle Toby, say no more;--but go down, Trim, this moment, my lad, and bring up my supper this instant.

      Trim ran down and brought up his master's supper,--to no purpose:--Trim's plan of operation ran so in my uncle Toby's head, he could not taste it.--Trim, quoth my uncle Toby, get me to bed.--'Twas all one.--Corporal Trim's description had fired his imagination,--my uncle Toby could not shut his eyes.--The more he considered it, the more bewitching the scene appeared to him;--so that, two full hours before day-light, he had come to a final determination and had concerted the whole plan of his and Corporal Trim's decampment.

      My uncle Toby had a little neat country-house of his own, in the village where my father's estate lay at Shandy, which had been left him by an old uncle, with a small estate of about one hundred pounds a-year. Behind this house, and contiguous to it, was a kitchen-garden of about half an acre, and at the bottom of the garden, and cut off from it by a tall yew hedge, was a bowling-green, containing just about as much ground as Corporal Trim wished for;--so that as Trim uttered the words, 'A rood and a half of ground to do what they would with,'--this identical bowling-green instantly presented itself, and became curiously painted all at once, upon the retina of my uncle Toby's fancy;--which was the physical cause of making him change colour, or at least of heightening his blush, to that immoderate degree I spoke of.

      Never did lover post down to a beloved mistress with more heat and expectation, than my uncle Toby did, to enjoy this self-same thing in private;--I say in private;--for it was sheltered from the house, as I told you, by a tall yew hedge, and was covered on the other three sides, from mortal sight, by rough holly and thick-set flowering shrubs:--so that the idea of not being seen, did not a little contribute to the idea of pleasure pre-conceived in my uncle Toby's mind.--Vain thought! however thick it was planted about,--or private soever it might seem,--to think, dear uncle Toby, of enjoying a thing which took up a whole rood and a half of ground,--and not have it known!

      How my uncle Toby and Corporal Trim managed this matter,--with the history of their campaigns, which were no way barren of events,--may make no uninteresting under-plot in the epitasis and working-up of this drama.--At present the scene must drop,--and change for the parlour fire-side.

      Chapter 1.XXXI.

      --What can they be doing? brother, said my father.--I think, replied my uncle Toby,--taking, as I told you, his pipe from his mouth, and striking the ashes out of it as he began his sentence;--I think, replied he,--it would not be amiss, brother, if we rung the bell.

      Pray, what's all that racket over our heads, Obadiah?--quoth my father;--my brother and I can scarce hear ourselves speak.

      Sir, answered Obadiah, making a bow towards his left shoulder,--my Mistress is taken very badly.--And where's Susannah running down the garden there, as if they were going to ravish her?--Sir, she is running the shortest cut into the town, replied Obadiah, to fetch the old midwife.--Then saddle a horse, quoth my father, and do you go directly for Dr. Slop, the man-midwife, with all our services,--and let him know your mistress is fallen into labour--and that I desire he will return with you with all speed.

      It is very strange, says my father, addressing himself to my uncle Toby, as Obadiah shut the door,--as there is so expert an operator as Dr. Slop so near,--that my wife should persist to the very last in this obstinate humour of hers, in trusting the life of my child, who has had one misfortune already, to the ignorance of an old woman;--and not only the life of my child, brother,--but her own life, and with it the lives of all the children I might, peradventure, have begot out of her hereafter.

      Mayhap, brother, replied my uncle Toby, my sister does it to save the expence:--A pudding's end,--replied my father,--the Doctor must be paid the same for inaction as action,--if not better,--to keep him in temper.

      --Then it can be out of nothing in the whole world, quoth my uncle Toby, in the simplicity of his heart,--but Modesty.--My sister, I dare say, added he, does not care to let a man come so near her.... I will not say whether my uncle Toby had completed the sentence or not;--'tis for his advantage to suppose he had,--as, I think, he could have added no One Word which would have improved it.

      If, on the contrary, my uncle Toby had not fully arrived at the period's end--then the world stands indebted to the sudden snapping of my father's tobacco-pipe for one of the neatest examples of that ornamental figure in oratory, which Rhetoricians stile the Aposiopesis.--Just Heaven! how does the Poco piu and the Poco meno of the Italian artists;--the insensible more or less, determine the precise line of beauty in the sentence, as well as in the statue! How do the slight touches of the chisel, the pencil, the pen, the fiddle-stick, et caetera,--give the true swell, which gives the true pleasure!--O my countrymen:--be nice; be cautious of your language; and never, O! never let it be forgotten upon what small particles your eloquence and your fame depend.

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