“If I understand you rightly, Protos influenced you not a little?”
“Perhaps. At any rate he rather overawed me. As a matter of fact, however, I never had but one single intimate conversation with him—but that seemed to me so cogent that the very next day I ran away from school, where I was beginning to droop like a plant in a cellar, and made my way on foot to Baden, where my mother was living at that time with my uncle, the Marquis de Gesvres.... But we are beginning by the end. You would certainly question me very badly. Just let me tell you my own story as it comes. You will learn more in that way than you would ever dream of asking me—more, very likely, than you will care to learn.... No, thank you, I prefer my own,” said he, taking out his case and throwing away the cigarette which Julius had offered him when he first came in and which he had allowed to go out while he was talking.
VII
“I was born at Bucharest in 1874,” he began slowly, “and, as I think you know, I lost my father a few months after my birth. The first person who stands out in my recollection at my mother’s side, was a German, my uncle, the Baron Heldenbruck. But as I lost him when I was twelve years old, I have only a hazy recollection of him. He was, it seems, a distinguished financier. As well as his own language, he taught me arithmetic, and that by such ingenious devices that I found it prodigiously amusing. He made me what he used laughingly to call his ‘cashier’—that is, he gave into my keeping a whole fortune of petty cash, and wherever we went together, it was I who had to do the paying. Whatever he bought—and he used to buy a great deal—he insisted on my adding up the bill in as short a time as it took me to pull the notes or coins out of my pocket. Sometimes he used to puzzle me with foreign money, so that there were questions of exchange; then of discount, of interest, of brokerage and finally even of speculation. With such a training, I very soon became fairly clever at doing multiplication—and even division—sums of several figures in my head.... Don’t be alarmed” (for he saw Julius’s eyebrows beginning to frown), “it gave me no taste either for money or reckoning. For instance, if you care to know, I never keep accounts. In reality this early education of mine was merely practical and matter-of-fact. It never touched anything vital in me.... Then Heldenbruck was wonderfully understanding about the proper hygiene for children; he persuaded my mother to let me go bare-headed and bare-footed in all weathers, and to keep me out of doors as much as possible; he used even to give me a cold dip himself every day, summer and winter. I enjoyed it immensely.... But you don’t care about these details.”
“Yes, yes!”
“Then he was called away on business to America and I never saw him again.
“My mother’s salon in Bucharest was frequented by the most brilliant, and also, as far as I can judge from recollection, by the most mixed society; but her particular intimates at that time were my uncle, Prince Wladimir Bielkowski and Ardengo Baldi, whom for some reason I never called my uncle. They spent three or four years at Bucharest in the service of Russia (I was going to say Poland) and of Italy. I learnt from each of them his own language—Polish, that is, and Italian—as for Russian, I read and understand it pretty well, but I have never spoken it fluently. In the society of the kind of people who frequented my mother’s house and who made a great deal of me, not a day passed without my having occasion to practise three or four languages; and at the age of thirteen I could speak them all without any accent and with almost equal ease—and yet French preferably, because it was my father’s tongue and my mother had made a point of my learning it first.
“Bielkowski, like everyone else who wanted to please my mother, took considerable notice of me; it always seemed as though I were the person to be courted; but in his case I think it was disinterested, for he always followed his bent, however rapidly it led him and in whatever direction. He paid a great deal of attention to me even outside of anything my mother could have knowledge of, and I couldn’t help being flattered by the particular attachment he had for me. Our rather humdrum existence was transformed by this singular person, from one day to the next, into a kind of riotous holiday. No! to talk of his yielding to his bent is not enough; his bent was a wild and precipitous rush; he flung himself upon his pleasure with a kind of frenzy.
“For three summers he carried us off to a villa, or rather to a castle, on the Hungarian slope of the Carpathians, near Eperjes; we often used to drive there, but we preferred riding and my mother enjoyed nothing better than scouring the country and the forests—which were very beautiful—on horseback and in any direction our fancy led us. The pony which Wladimir gave me was the thing I loved best on earth for a whole year.
“During the second summer, Ardengo Baldi joined us; it was then that he taught me chess. Heldenbruck had broken me in to doing sums in my head and I was pretty soon able to play without looking at the chess-board.