The Professor / Учитель. Книга для чтения на английском языке

“I tell you, Mr. Hunsden, you are a more unpractical man than I am an unpractical woman, for you don’t acknowledge what really exists; you want to annihilate individual patriotism and national greatness as an atheist would annihilate God and his own soul, by denying their existence.”

“Where are you flying to? You are off at a tangent – I thought we were talking about the mercenary nature of the Swiss.”

“We were – and if you proved to me that the Swiss are mercenary to-morrow (which you cannot do) I should love Switzerland still.”

“You would be mad, then – mad as a March hare[504] – to indulge in a passion for millions of shiploads of soil, timber, snow, and ice.”

“Not so mad as you who love nothing.”

“There’s a method in my madness; there’s none in yours.”

“Your method is to squeeze the sap out of creation and make manure of the refuse, by way of turning it to what you call use.”

“You cannot reason at all,” said Hunsden; “there is no logic in you.”

“Better to be without logic than without feeling,” retorted Frances, who was now passing backwards and forwards from her cupboard to the table, intent, if not on hospitable thoughts, at least on hospitable deeds, for she was laying the cloth, and putting plates, knives and forks thereon.

“Is that a hit at me, mademoiselle? Do you suppose I am without feeling?”

“I suppose you are always interfering with your own feelings, and those of other people, and dogmatizing about the irrationality of this, that, and the other sentiment, and then ordering it to be suppressed because you imagine it to be inconsistent with logic.”

“I do right.”

Frances had stepped out of sight into a sort of little pantry; she soon reappeared.

“You do right? Indeed, no! You are much mistaken if you think so. Just be so good as to let me get to the fire, Mr. Hunsden; I have something to cook.” (An interval occupied in settling a casserole on the fire; then, while she stirred its contents:) “Right! as if it were right to crush any pleasurable sentiment that God has given to man, especially any sentiment that, like patriotism, spreads man’s selfishness in wider circles” (fire stirred, dish put down before it).

“Were you born in Switzerland?”

“I should think so, or else why should I call it my country?”

“And where did you get your English features and figure?”

“I am English, too; half the blood in my veins is English; thus I have a right to a double power of patriotism, possessing an interest in two noble, free, and fortunate countries.”

“You had an English mother?”

“Yes, yes; and you, I suppose, had a mother from the moon or from Utopia, since not a nation in Europe has a claim on your interest?”

“On the contrary, I’m a universal patriot, if you could understand me rightly: my country is the world.”

“Sympathies so widely diffused must be very shallow: will you have the goodness to come to table. Monsieur” (to me who appeared to be now absorbed in reading by moonlight) – “monsieur, supper is served.”

This was said in quite a different voice to that in which she had been bandying phrases with Mr. Hunsden – not so short, graver and softer.

“Frances, what do you mean by preparing, supper? we had no intention of staying.”

“Ah, monsieur, but you have stayed, and supper is prepared; you have only the alternative of eating it[505].”

The meal was a foreign one, of course; it consisted in two small but tasty dishes of meat prepared with skill and served with nicety; a salad and “fromage français[506],” completed it. The business of eating interposed a brief truce between the belligerents, but no sooner was supper disposed of than they were at it again. The fresh subject of dispute ran on the spirit of religious intolerance which Mr. Hunsden afifrmed to exist strongly in Switzerland, notwithstanding the professed attachment of the Swiss to freedom. Here Frances had greatly the worst of it, not only because she was unskilled to argue, but because her own real opinions on the point in question happened to coincide pretty nearly with Mr. Hunsden’s, and she only contradicted him out of opposition. At last she gave in, confessing that she thought as he thought, but bidding him take notice that she did not consider herself beaten.

“No more did the French at Waterloo,” said Hunsden.

“There is no comparison between the cases,” rejoined Frances; “mine was a sham fight.”

“Sham or real, it’s up with you.”

“No; though I have neither logic nor wealth of words, yet in a case where my opinion really differed from yours, I would adhere to it when I had not another word to say in its defence; you should be baffled by dumb determination. You speak of Waterloo; your Wellington[507] ought to have been conquered there, according to Napoleon; but he persevered in spite of the laws of war, and was victorious in defiance of military tactics. I would do as he did.”

“I’ll be bound for it you would; probably you have some of the same sort of stubborn stuff in you.”