SO another two years and a half went by. And then a variety of events took place in such juxtaposition as to make a farce of their combination. At the time I tended to believe they were tragic.

One night at the Alhambra bar a man whom I knew only casually tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I would care to join the party in his box. Chedeville had shortly before returned to Paris, Kolovrat was out of town and for the moment I was alone. He added that two of his guests were the Wiesner sisters and they had expressed a desire to meet me. This was their first introduction to a night club and he thought perhaps I could help enlighten them. They were nice girls, society and all that.

As he implied, it was conceivable they had heard of me, but their name was unfamiliar and I had no wish to meet them or any other sweet young innocents of society. The man continued his pleading that I help him out and I finally consented after assuring him, with a bachelor’s usual facility, that I had a later date elsewhere.

The show was under way, so introductions were made in an undertone in the darkened box and the two girls turned their attention back to the stage. In the reflected glow from the footlights I studied their profiles. They were both quite young, probably seventeen and nineteen. The younger one was indrawn and shy and the older was self-assured and eager. I had heard their names as Olga and Toni. Olga, the younger fair-haired one, was very beautiful and I found myself watching her with interest. Her hair was parted in the middle and brought smoothly across her temples and behind her ears. One expected it to end in pigtails, but it hung in loose soft curls to her shoulders. Part of the time she watched the stage and then she would drop her eyes to her lap, after awhile raising them again.

Toni showed no traces of her sister’s embarrassment. On the stage the infamous Anita Berber was giving one of her contorted, half-naked obscene dances in which she tried to express the struggles of a pervert, or perhaps this time it was a drug addict. I had no interest in Berber but I could not take my eyes from this society girl who was trembling with excitement as she watched. What could such a dance signify in her eyes? What was she thinking as she watched? Once she turned with a quick, impulsive movement to smile over her shoulder at me in the dark, and then she went back to her intense preoccupation with the dance. Toni had none of the smoldering, nascent beauty of her younger sister, yet she was strikingly attractive because of her taut eagerness and a certain youthful freshness.

The acquaintance who had brought me to the box centered his attention on Olga after the show was over, so I found myself escorting Toni when they prepared to leave. At the awning before the entrance of the hotel they stepped into a handsome limousine, a chauffeur wrapped fur rugs about their knees, and just before he closed the door Toni leaned forward to ask if I would come soon to see her at the home of her family. I bowed and they drove away.

“She’s fallen for you,” the man said. “Not bad. Do you know how many millions she represents?”

I muttered something and left him to return to the bar. Within an hour I had forgotten the entire episode.

A week or so later I was dining at the Restaurant Elner with friends when I saw the two girls again. They were in the company of two people who were presumably their parents. As I passed their table on my way out, bowing slightly when I caught Olga’s eye, Toni reached out to stop me and then introduced me to her mother and father. I murmured a few pleasantries and rejoined my friends. Once again I forgot them.

Two days later I received a note from Mrs. Wiesner, inviting me to dine with them on a specified date. I started to dictate a polite refusal to my secretary and then changed my mind. I have always been curious about human beings; added to this incentive for accepting the invitation was a state of mind verging on boredom which I had been harboring for some weeks. The gambler’s blood of my father warmed my brain and I wrote that I would be with them for dinner on the night in question.

The Wiesners lived in a large apartment in a new building. Before I had been there five minutes I learned that they also owned an extensive estate in the country. Papa Wiesner was a magnate of the clothing industry, but he also made money, money, money in a dozen other enterprises from moving-picture theaters to paving blocks. Wherever he invested a crown, a thousand crowns came back to him. He originated no ideas of his own and no one gave him any. By chance he had made his first thousand and after that he had only to hold on to it, using the power it gave him to milk the brains, inspiration and trust of small people for his own benefit. His manners were the essence of stupidity and bad taste.

Mama Wiesner looked as though she had escaped from a circus troupe. The way she wore her hair was extreme, her evening gown was ridiculous, her manners effusive and loud. Pompous, ugly and common, she reminded me of nothing so much as a fishwife in ermine. No one else could initiate a subject of conversation. She was as loud, vulgar and gross as the furnishings of the rooms she lived in. Any doubt I might have been harboring as to the advisability of living underground in night clubs when I could have been making a place for myself in bourgeois society instead, I lost at once.

The hour at the dinner table was a ghastly experience. Olga hardly raised her eyes from her plate. Even Toni was nervous and uncomfortable, watching my reaction to her family. Here in the bright light from the chandelier overhead she had the knowing eyes of a woman. Her cheekbones were wide and her mouth was wide and full, but there was no laughter in the corners of it now. I felt suddenly sorry for this daughter of a millionaire who was trembling for fear Jan Rieger of Smichov would not like her family. I felt so sorry for her that I lost my annoyance with her mother and father. I wanted to shield her from their depredations on her character, to show her that it was all right, she could be an individual separate from them, untainted by their grossness because she was able to see it for what it was.

I must have communicated something of what I felt across the table, for her nervousness lessened. Under the light, her chestnut hair had a tawny glint in it, and her dark lashes shaded enormous, vivid eyes. Chiefly because her brows were so high and arched, her eyes seemed always wide open and forthright. Even when she sat still and said nothing there was a permanent sparkle about her, in marked contrast to the sad, delicate beauty of her younger sister. Unlike the night club entertainers I had known, she was a mystery to me as well as a challenge.

One course followed another, served by badly trained maids. My experience in night clubs and restaurants made me long to jump up and call for my bill in disgust. Papa and Mama Wiesner were trying to outdo each other in flattering me. Watching Toni, I tried not to listen to what they were saying. Papa needed a young partner in his business. . . . It would be a fine thing for a bright young man to take over the management of all his holdings. . . . There would be limitless opportunity to make his own way, backed by the Wiesner millions. . . . Young men didn’t get opportunities like that every day. . . . It would be a smart fellow who saw a good thing when it was offered him.

Olga excused herself and left the table. Mama Wiesner interrupted her husband’s monologue to tell me what a good girl Olga was. Papa shook his head violently and Toni rose and asked if they would excuse us, too. I followed her from the room. Somehow the rest of the evening passed and I took my leave at the earliest possible hour for terminating a dinner engagement. I had paid for my curiosity; I promised myself not to be such a fool again.

But as though one bad decision could only be followed by another, I found myself less than a week later faced by the first setback in my career. It was the last day of December in 1925. Chedeville had come to me just before noon with a whimsical complaint. He had returned from Paris that morning and a clerk in the bank just across the street from us in which he kept an account had offered him what he considered a bad exchange rate for his francs. He was only half serious as he told me how impertinent the clerk had been when he complained, but in typical French fashion his emotions intensified as he spun out his story until he was excited and angry at its end. He would do no more business with such an organization, he said.

I knew the importance to my own bank of an account like Chedeville’s, which might in turn bring us even larger accounts from the French mission. Their prestige value was great. So I quieted Chedeville’s anger and gave him a slip of paper to take to one of the tellers downstairs. On it I asked that he be given every consideration as a friend of mine and treated as well as possible in the matter of exchange.

I might have been more careful in the wording of the note; I might have realized the possibility of ambiguity in my request. But I didn’t. Unfortunately for all of us, the teller interpreted my words to mean that I wished him to give Captain Chedeville the internal rate of exchange reserved for officers in banks and financial houses, which differed by an amount equal to a fraction of an American cent from the rate available to the public. Chedeville was unaware that he had received a special privilege, and went straight across the street to his own bank to tell them how much better he had been treated by us, adding that he intended to transfer his account at once.

Ten minutes later I was called to the office of the general manager of the Associated Bank. He was angry as he demanded an explanation of my action in breaking what I knew to be a mutual agreement among the banks with regard to the internal rate of exchange. Chedeville’s bank had lost no time in complaining. For a moment I was unable to think why I was at fault and even how Chedeville had been able to obtain this extra fraction of a cent on his francs, and then I realized what must have happened in the teller’s mind. He had thought I was asking him to give my friend as good a rate of exchange as he would give me.

Without waiting for me to explain, the general manager proceeded to give me what we call a terrific head washing. I have never enjoyed being shouted at, and certainly not without cause, but his anger gave me time to think. If I threw the blame on the teller, he would certainly lose his job with us and it would probably cost him his reputation in all the banks in the city. When I finally found an opportunity to speak I tried to explain the importance of Chedeville and the unimportance of the fraction of a cent, but I knew it was no use. The general manager was waiting for me to apologize and ask forgiveness, after which he could report to the bank across the street that I had been properly chastised.

It was my turn to be angry. I left his room without another word and returned to my own office. After awhile I called the personnel director on the phone and told him about the unfortunate episode. I asked him if he thought I was expected to resign at once, and he told me to do nothing until he could talk to me, and hung up. An hour later he came to my office, in the meantime having conferred with the directors. They had no intention of kicking me out because they considered me a man of potential value to them. But for the prestige of the bank, some action must be taken. If I would not go on record with an apology, I must be kicked up to a post as assistant manager in one of the branch banks in a small town in Moravia where a vacancy had just occurred.

He watched me intently as he talked, and whatever my face may have told him, it prompted him to go on. In a few years, he said, I would be called back to the central office in Prague if I managed not to let myself become a forgotten man, and would probably then be given the direction of a department. In the meantime, I would have an opportunity to prove myself in the backwoods.

When he left me it was three o’clock. I had until the bank opened on the second of January to decide what I wanted to do. The very thought of leaving Prague to live in a small town in the perimeter of the country gave me the same kind of shudders the word Siberia must have produced in an officer of St. Petersburg in the days of the czar. So I sat at my desk and began to recapitulate the waymarks of my life, trying to find an answer for the future from the mistakes of the past.

Mother was without need now, but she would be relatively insecure if anything happened to me. I had wasted money, thrown it away in amounts which once would have represented security for both of us for our whole life. Yet the spending had never been entirely reckless. It had helped my career. To have been modest, economical, diligent and unimportant would have insured my job as a teller, but it would hardly have brought me to the position I now held. Virtue alone would not have been enough; it was my bad behavior, even my colorful sins, which had pushed me forward. Put less dramatically, it was the contact I had made with many foreigners of high position that made me seem both incalculable and enterprising in the eyes of the bank. I had made a name for myself in my own way, and friends of my own choosing. The only time the directors of the bank met these men whom I knew intimately was on official occasions in a large crowd. Wrong or right, I could hardly go back now to being a diligent and serious fellow.

As I sat there the telephone rang and the voice that greeted me from the other end of the wire was strange. Then I recognized Toni Wiesner. I answered her greetings for the new year absent-mindedly, and then I heard her inviting me to join a party that night. I excused myself by saying that I had a previous engagement. She waited a moment and I heard a sharp intake of breath, like an inverted sigh.

The first of January is a day of traditional celebrations and superstitions in Czechoslovakia. It seems of tremendous importance to us that the year start with good omens. We open our doors or pick up our ringing telephones with apprehension, lest our first caller be an enemy instead of a friend. As the year starts, so will it end.

I heard Toni still talking, asking me now if I would perhaps consider seeing her alone, not in a party. Would I prefer that? Even for a little while, if I had another engagement later on? I had no other engagement for that night, except a vague agreement to show up at a large gathering in one of the clubs. Toni’s call was an omen of some sort and I dared not ignore it, in the face of the mistakes I had made recently. We made an arrangement to meet for dinner and I said I would get theater tickets, too.

But the evening was not a success. Toni was excitable and I was absent-minded, still turning over in my head the choice of two evils which faced me. She tried very hard to convince me that she was sophisticated, not realizing how much I preferred her natural state of wide-eyed wonder. I scolded her mildly and drifted off again with my own worries, and shortly before midnight I took her home.

I had no intention of going in when we reached the door of her apartment, but as we came up the stairs her father descended upon us and took me by the arm and propelled me inside, trying to say something through a cigar he was chewing about wanting to talk to me. Toni protested violently and then I found that we were alone in the drawing room. I took out a handkerchief and passed it over my brow, fumbled for cigarettes and lit one for each of us. Toni had crossed the room to lean against the piano with her back to me. As I held out the lighted cigarette she turned about to face me, her hands on the shining ebony behind her for support. I had never seen such an expression of confused frustration.

She ignored the cigarette, so I mashed its tip in a tray. “Don’t look at me,” she said before I could turn around again. “Stand where you are . . . please do. I want to say something, but I can’t if you watch me.” A grandfather’s clock began to strike the hour somewhere in the house. Neither of us moved or made a sound as it went through the measure of twelve strokes. Before the reverberation had ended she went on. “I’ve got to get away from here. I’ve just got to. If I don’t, I’ll get like Olga. I know what I’m saying. I know what I’m doing. That night you came to dinner . . . it’s always like that. Don’t pay any attention to them. Just me.”

I could hear her small fists beating against the piano, but I stayed as I was. Her words seemed to have no intrinsic meaning; they were a counterpart of my own muddled thoughts.

“I’ve never done this before, you know. But I’ve got to get away. Right away. I’ve just got to. He’s not my father. Mama married him after my father died. She wasn’t always like this. I . . . please, Mr. Rieger, will you take me away from here?”

I knew she had asked me a question, but what was the answer? I had so many answers to think about all at once. It was the first part of the first day of a new year, and I must make no more mistakes.

“It’s New Year’s,” she said, as though to emphasize my own thoughts. “I know you don’t love me, but I don’t care.”

I could feel her wide, vivid eyes on my back, feel the intensity of her desperation. Through my mind raced a thousand images . . . Rée, lovely and warm Rée, the general manager of the bank and a stupid provincial town perhaps like the one in Slovakia where I had been quartered two years, the smoky rooms of my night clubs and all the short but intense and eternal moments with women I would never see again.

“I’m not afraid of . . . of . . . sin,” she said. “I could learn.”

I turned around then and laughed. “Silly girl,” I said. “Come here.”

She was as beautiful as a young bird ruffling her feathers to attract a mate. Her eyes were shining in the soft light and her lips were half open. She moved toward me easily and when she stood before me she put her arms about my neck. “Will you marry me?” she said. “And take me away from here?”

I looked down into her eager face. I pulled her arms from about my neck and took one of her small, boneless hands and kissed it. My father would have understood me just then, I knew. I left her standing there and walked through the hall to the library where Papa and Mama Wiesner were sitting together, suspiciously expectant. I gave them no opportunity to say anything as I bowed and asked them in a dry voice for the hand of their daughter Toni.

For answer I received a punch on the back from Papa and a wet kiss on the cheek from Mama. Wiesner tried to say something about my position in the business world as the husband of his daughter. I turned on my heel and went back to Toni, but I remembered his words.