The reason of my being only one year with the family Schweiger I cannot quite remember. Enough to say that I returned again to Pest, that I once more occupied the seat of disgrace in the Café Orczy, and went from there to the Puszta Csěv, not far from Monor, to a Mr. Schauengel, where I stayed only six months, fortunately in the spring and summer; for life in a lonely house on the Puszta (Heath), notwithstanding my love of solitude, soon became too much for me, and the terrible monotony of the scenery made me almost melancholy. Here I had the first foretaste of the Steppe regions of Central Asia, afterwards to be the scenes of my adventurous travels. On the Puszta itself no tree was to be seen for miles round, and when in the afternoons I wanted to read out of doors, the only shade I could find against the scorching sun of the hot summer months was under a haycock or straw-rick. Exhausted with the hard study of the Orientalia, I used to indulge here in my favourite reading of the Odyssey, for I had meanwhile also learned Greek. Stretched out on the grass I recited aloud the glorious scenes and wonderful stories, and never noticed the shepherd who was grazing his flock in the neighbourhood, standing before me, both hands leaning on his staff, and listening in breathless attention to the strange sounds, half admiring, half pitying me; for on the Puszta they all thought I was possessed of the devil—a man who had learned far too much, lost his reason, and now talked nonsense. When in my lonely walks I stood still and gazed into the far distance, these simple children of nature used to look at me with a kind of reverence and awe; sometimes they avoided me, and only the most daring of them ventured to approach and question me as to a lost head of cattle or about the weather. My fame as an eccentric spread over the whole neighbourhood, and to this I owed my invitation to the house of Mr. Karl Balla, the owner of the neighbouring Puszta Pot-Haraszt, and late director of the prison of the Pest county. Herr Balla, an elderly, humane, and amiable man, a passionate meteorologist, who had on his Puszta erected high poles with weathercocks, had also the reputation of being an eccentric. Like seeks like; a mutual friendship grew up between us, and when he proposed to me to come and spend the winter at his house and instruct his son Zádor in French and English, I gladly accepted, the more so as Mr. Schauengel intended to send his children to town for the winter, and I should therefore again have been out of a place.
As far as the personality of my principal was concerned, my residence at Pot-Haraszti promised to be very pleasant indeed. I had a quiet, large room looking into the garden, the food was excellent, my teaching duties only occupied a few hours of the day, and I had plenty of time and leisure to devote to the study of the Oriental languages, more especially Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. The latter had a particularly magic influence upon me at that time, and the literary treasures which I found in a Chrestomathy of Vullers filled me with an ecstasy of delight. Sadi, Jámí, and Khakani were ideals to which I gladly sacrificed many a night's sleep and many a drive. Unfortunately the family of Herr Balla had not attained to the same degree of culture as the paterfamilias. The lady of the house could never bear the idea that a Jew was occupying the position of prefect in her house, and her constant sneering at my origin and my want of gentlemanly manners necessarily undermined my authority over my pupils; there were unpleasant scenes every day, and when these gave rise to family quarrels—for the old gentleman always firmly took my side—I made up my mind, though with a heavy heart, to leave this spot so favourable to my studies, and went to Pest, where, after waiting six months, I obtained an equally good position at Csetény, in the county of Veszprém, with Mr. Grünfeld, who rented the place.
This was my last position as private tutor in Hungary, and the kind treatment which I received from the generous and noble-minded Grünfeld family has also left the most vivid and pleasant recollections of my varied and sometimes very difficult pedagogic career. Only one sad circumstance is connected with my sojourn in this quiet village in the Bakony, and it has left its ineffaceable traces on my memory. It was on the 11th of November, 1856, on a rainy evening that, after remaining in the family circle in pleasant conversation till ten o'clock, I was just about to retire to my room, which was outside in the court. As I opened the front door I saw to my horror a number of masked people before me, one of whom took me by the chest and threw me with force back into the room, while the others stormed in after him, each of them taking hold of a member of the panic-stricken family, threatening to kill any one who dared to utter a sound. It was a band of robbers who had come over from the neighbouring Bakony Forest. They had watched their opportunity to attack Mr. Grünfeld, who had returned the day before with a considerable sum of money from the Pest Market. Lying on the floor with one of those ruffians kneeling on my chest and the barrel of the pistol wet with the rain pressed to my forehead, I gradually recovered my senses. The sight of that dim, lamplighted scene, with the ghastly faces of the terror-stricken family, has stamped itself for ever on my memory like some dreadful dream.
Still more terrible scenes followed. We were dragged from one room to the other, and while the servants of the house stood bound outside, sighing and groaning, Mr. Grünfeld was requested to give up all his effects and money. He was robbed of about 20,000 florins; but as this did not satisfy the rapacity of those wild fellows, and one of them pointed the barrel of his gun to the breast of the father of the family, I lost all patience, jumped up, and placing the weapon on my own breast I cried, "If you must kill, kill me; I have neither wife nor child, it is better that I should die." These words seemed to make an impression on the leader of the band, probably a political fugitive who had retired into the forest to escape the vengeance of the Austrian Government, for at a sign from him his accomplices refrained from shedding blood. They collected all the money and valuables, and after searching my room also, but only depriving me of some volumes of Hungarian classics, they went away, leaving us all locked up in the dark room.
This ghastly nocturnal scene might have had serious consequences for me, for the police of the district of Zircz, to which Csetény belonged, came upon the bright idea of suspecting me—who even at that time as a Hungarian scholar was in touch with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences—to be a secret accomplice of this robber band of fugitive rebels; and they were strengthened in their suspicion by the fact that I had opened the door, and, with the exception of the books, had escaped without loss. A zealous anti-Magyar even went so far as to suggest that it would be wise to take me into custody, and await my trial. I should certainly have been locked up and treated for months like any common criminal, if my good friend Mr. Grünfeld had not answered for me and affirmed my innocence. Instead of going to the sunny Levant, I might have been shut up in prison without any fault of mine.
This sojourn with the Grünfeld family concluded my career as private tutor. All my thoughts were now fixed upon the idea of accomplishing something definite, something more in keeping with all my previous studies, and no longer running wildly after chimeras. I therefore made up my mind to go to the East at once, and though it cost me much to leave the peaceful haven of rest and comfort, I took the necessary steps to set out on my travels. The last link with the land of my birth was broken, for my mother, whom I dearly loved, died shortly before my departure. My name was the last word that passed her lips, and her death left me absolutely alone, with no one to care for me in all the world.
Before concluding this chapter of my career as private tutor, I must not forget to mention that these six years were the most productive of all my life and formed the nucleus of all my future actions. Looking back upon the many vicissitudes of my early life, the long chain of incredible privations, and the insatiable desire for knowledge, I must confess with sorrow that my labour would have been far more profitable and beneficial if I had not been led astray by my rare power of memory and an innate talent for languages and conversation; if, instead of blindly rushing forward regardless of obstacles, I had worked more quietly, more leisurely, and more thoroughly. I had an immense number of foreign languages in my head. I could say by heart long passages from the Parnasso Italiano, Byron, Pushkin, Tegner, and Saadi. I could speak fluently and write moderately well in several of these languages; yet my learning was absolutely without system or method, and it was not until I had had actual intercourse with the various nations and had paid the penalty of my many shortcomings and erroneous notions, that I could rejoice in having attained a certain degree of perfection. It is chiefly due to this haste and eagerness to get on that in the course of my later studies I always preferred a wide field of action to great depth, and always set my mind rather on expansion than on penetration.
Nor will I hide the fact that, in spite of want and distress, in spite of poverty and loneliness, a great longing for the pleasures and dissipations of youth often possessed me, and that in order to avoid useless waste of time I had to keep a very strict watch, and often had to reprimand and punish myself. For many years I used to spend New Year's Eve in solitude to give an account to myself of all I had done in the past twelve months, and to write out and seal the programme for the new year; and when I opened this on the following 31st of December and saw that some one or other point had remained unaccomplished, I wrote bitter reproaches on the margin as reminders, and was out of sorts for days. Besides this, I had my daily calendar, marked with the rubrics for different subjects of study, which had to be attended to before going to sleep. If by chance one or other of these rubrics had not been filled in, I tried to make up for it the next day, and when I could not manage that I punished myself by absenting myself from the table under the pretext of a headache or indigestion. With my healthy appetite this was the severest punishment I could think of, and the irritating clatter of plates and knives and forks from the adjoining dining-room was indeed a sore temptation.
Now I can smile over this self-chastisement; but he who has to fight by himself the battle of youthful folly may easily fall a victim to thoughtlessness. The eye becomes dazzled by the rosy, smiling picture of the present, and gets weary of looking into the future.
My young readers, who enter the school of life guided by the admonitions of parents or teachers, do not realise perhaps how beneficial and useful these disagreeable-sounding corrections may be some day. They are the stars that twinkle in the perilous darkness of youthful eagerness. I missed these helps, and I must call myself fortunate that a kind Providence spared me the sad consequences of this want.