ON this return to Prague there were not so many outward changes to be seen in the face of the city. What I found instead was a tendency in myself to look at it with new eyes. For the first time I was able to compare it with another European capital, as a man can compare women perceptively only after he has known one intimately. Paris had taught me how to come to understanding terms with a city, and now I loved my own Prague not less but more for the experience. I saw new meanings in its ancient traditions, its old gray stones and crooked streets and terraced gardens, its parks and homely pleasures, its domes and spires and chanting bells. It was my natural home and I knew that now, and was glad.

The Paris train gets in shortly after seven in the evening. As we had done on my return from the war, Mother and I talked nearly all night. She was less changed this time, though her spirit seemed to have gained new strength, an added firmness which she tried to transfer to me. Toni wasn’t mentioned then or at any other time. That was how Mother was.

The following day I went to the bank to present myself to the director who had written me in Paris, Antonín Hardt. All the way there I kept my collar up and the brim of my hat pulled down, and as I followed the familiar route through the door of the bank and up to his office a strange mixture of thoughts coursed through my mind. Hardt’s welcome was cordial as well as delicate; it allowed my inferiority complex no chance to function. Instead of waiting for me to cross the long room to his desk, he came toward me with his arm outstretched to take my hand, asking at the same time if my trip from Paris had been good and how had I found my mother? Again there was no mention of my wife.

When I was seated beside his desk and cigarettes were lighted he began to talk about the subject of his letter, implying that I had done the bank a favor in responding with my presence. The board of directors, it transpired, were looking for a man to fill a certain new position now in their control. The qualifications for the work had been carefully considered and it was only after Hardt had met me in Paris—without mentioning now how he had chanced to meet me or the manner of my work there—that he knew their search was ended if I could be persuaded to consider their proposition. The directors had already met and agreed that it be put up to me.

The Associated Bank had been forced to take over management of one of the many industries in which it held shares. This was a practice all over Europe. Whenever a bank came into ownership of the majority of stock in a company, or even a proportionately large share, at least one and often several directors of the bank immediately became directors of the company, and its president was appointed from among themselves. Every bank in our country maintained interests in all kinds of industry: coal, textiles, sugar, flour mills, shoes, glass and china, clothing, steel and armaments.

So the Associated Bank had recently acquired control of a glass factory in Carlsbad which had one small salesroom in Prague and branches in several resorts in Czechoslovakia as well as one in Paris. It was a new manager for the Prague salesroom the bank was searching for, a man with the kind of business experience I had acquired in Paris. The turnover of sales in the Prague branch was small, but the directors believed it could be developed to the point where it would help the recovery of the firm.

I listened to Hardt’s words and thought about the man himself, as well as the implications of what he was saying. He was a paradox of warm kindliness and cool logic. This offer was not being made as a favor to me; if the bank wanted me to work for them again in this new capacity it was because they believed I could work to their advantage. But what made them think so? I had learned a great deal about department store methods in Paris, and about travel, but the merchandising and selling of glass was another matter. How could I promote glass when I hadn’t the least idea how it was made, what its qualities were, even the extension of its many uses?

When I found words for my doubts Hardt brushed them abruptly aside. Such considerations had already been discussed in the directors’ meeting. They knew me and they believed I could do the job they had in mind. The only people left to convince were the men in the factory itself. It was run by a board of three and they were raising heavy objections to the appointment of someone who had had no experience with glass. The bank wanted me to go to Carlsbad to see these people. If an agreement could be reached with them regarding my appointment, I could stay there several weeks to learn how the factory was run before returning to take up my new duties in Prague.

There was nothing more for me to say. He asked me to think it over and let him have my decision within a few days. He saw me out as cordially as he had greeted me, and I walked home again with my hat still pulled far over my eyes.

To anyone unfamiliar with European ways, I am sure the position in which I found myself that day would be next to impossible to understand. On the Continent, no man ever expected a second chance to make good. I phrase that in the past tense deliberately. We did not have the same intense preoccupation with “face” that Orientals do, but we certainly felt its importance far more than Anglo-Saxons can ever understand. I had not lost face when I left the bank to go to Paris, because it was understood that I had stepped into the business world of my father-in-law’s enterprises. But when that association ended abruptly, and I stayed on in Paris to be discovered eventually serving as a minor clerk in a tourist office, I had lost face more completely than if I had done nothing in Paris to earn a legitimate living.

In Europe, when a man falls down from a position he has occupied with distinction, he is considered to have fallen for one reason only: because he is no good. It is incomprehensible to a European how college students in America can wash dishes and wait on tables and press clothes, and then fraternize on equal terms with their fellow students when the work is over, even hoping to rise one day to positions more eminent than those held by the men they are serving. It is equally beyond their comprehension how an American can lose everything he has worked years to build up for himself and then when adversity hits him, set about building again from the bottom up. A bank president selling apples on Broadway after his bank has crashed appears to a European ludicrous and shameful, if not incredible.

In Europe, when men fall from pedestals no one gives them a hand or offers to help them up. Except in very rare instances, once down they stay down. Nor do they make the mistake of trying to climb back by themselves. There is no alternative but to keep on going, though face must be saved through it all. It never occurs to a man who has met reverses to alter his mode of living, so long as he has not yet spent his last cent. He pretends that his setback was only a minor incident, already nullified by a great scheme which is working according to his deep-laid plans. He mobilizes his relatives and his friends, makes extravagant outlines of new enterprises in which he will, of course, be headman with an impressive title, always better than the position he has lost. In short, he behaves like a shipwrecked man from first-class who believes his only chance of survival is on a raft with companions from his own part of the ship because they are the right people.

No set of generalizations based upon human behavior is without exception. Some men did manage to come back, but when they reached the top a second time there was often a strange smell about them. No one was able to take it for granted that they had come back the hard way, unless the feat was accomplished after a migration to the United States, that lightning rod of countries which has for three hundred years drawn off into its ground the dangerously ambitious, the frustrated, the failures, allowing them hope and a second chance.

Americans are well aware of the way Europe has affected their lives through the impact of two wars in this century. Yet they are inclined to misunderstand how their own policies have affected Europe. When the United States clamped down its quota system, the result was a sense of claustrophobia all over the Continent. This reaction was the more acute because the war had unleashed so much violence in the crowded lands of the old world. It is worth considering whether or not there would have been the spate of Fascist parties in Europe after 1918 had the opportunity to migrate to America not dried up.

When I left Hardt that day in January I spent no time thinking along this line of reasoning about face-saving. I knew it all intuitively. What puzzled me beyond belief was why the board of directors of the Associated Bank chose to give me this second chance. It was unnatural. And yet Hardt’s manner had been too cordial and forthright to be misunderstood. There was a missing link in the chain of circumstances which I couldn’t find, and until I did, I had no intention of accepting their offer.

There was no point in trying to talk this over with Mother. Her answers to all problems were simple and good and usually right, but when the problem was her only son’s future, she could hardly be expected to grasp reality sufficiently to give sound advice on the subject.

I thought of Karel Berounský. He was the man to tell me what to do. I went home and waited until nightfall, and then I found my way to his bachelor apartment in Vinohrady. It was the first of hundreds of long nights I spent with him there. He lay on his couch with his feet on a stack of cushions, or he sat crossways in a lounge chair with his feet on a bookcase while I paced the floor and talked. This was what I had hungered for in Paris without knowing it—that sharp bite into the mind of masculine conversation, the weight and pungency of it. We understood each other with no flourishes of explanation because our dissimilarity of temperament was plainly marked. It was my way to talk around a point because I relished the devious courses I took to enclose the heart of anything I wanted to emphasize. Karel punctuated my stories and excursions with mere grunts of disapproval or snorts of derision, calling me here a sucker and there a fool. But he listened to me hour after hour.

It was nearly dawn before I let myself bring up the matter of the bank’s offer of a new position under their aegis. One by one I outlined the facts as Hardt had given them to me. It was the ultimate test of friendship, this laying bare my full face for Karel to see.

His right leg dangled up and down on the fulcrum of his left knee. He lit another cigarette from the stub of the one he was finishing. I waited out of range of his penetrating, observing glance. When he finally spoke, all he said was “Well?”

“What do they want me back for, after . . . Paris? How can I give them an answer until I know why they want me?”

“Idiot,” he said, making the word in Czech sound sharp and final.

I shoved aside the folds of curtains at his windows to let in the winter morning. “It’s a terrible responsibility,” I said. “I know nothing about glass. It may be that the men in the factory, as Hardt said, will refuse to have me.”

“If the bank wants you, they’ll have you. Besides, it’s only a small shop.”

I turned to look at him but he was staring at the ceiling.

“You know what I mean,” I said. “I’m not afraid of responsible work. I’m afraid to fail again in Prague. If I start in as manager of a glass shop now, after . . . leaving the bank as I did three years ago . . . no one is likely to support me. The business isn’t paying and they want me to make it pay. I’m not the man to do it.”

His leg stopped waggling and he turned his head slowly to look at me. “Hardt told you why you were the man they picked, didn’t he?”

“No. That’s what I can’t figure out. It doesn’t make sense, and until it does I can’t make a decision.”

Karel unwound himself and sat up straight. “All right, fellow,” he said. “If that’s all you want to know, you’ve got it now. My information is confidential through the bank, but I know what I’m saying and you listen tight. After Hardt happened to run into you in Paris, one of the first pieces of business that came up before the board of directors happened to be this glass factory they’d just taken over as a bad debt. They had decided to build up the Prague outlet and Hardt suggested you as the man to do it. He made quite a speech. He said they all knew you were able. What they didn’t know was that you had gone broke in Paris. And instead of your getting into the office of a questionable speculator, or turning into a gigolo, you were earning a respectable living in a very small way. Who ever heard of such a thing? Had you ever written any of them to ask for help? No! Had you ever been known to ask anyone for anything? No! Thinking it over, they decided you were a most remarkable fellow, and the bank would be crazy not to make further use of you.”

At the conclusion of this longest speech I had ever heard him make, Karel wound himself up again on the couch and went back to staring at the ceiling. I tried to take in the implication of his words but I found it difficult. I went back to pacing the floor. Somewhere I had deviated from the usual pattern, because I had acted in the only way that seemed natural to me, and now I was being rewarded for behaving like myself.

After awhile Karel said, “You’re still crazy, but don’t make a mistake in this. Tell Hardt tomorrow you’ll accept the offer. Never mind what they pay you. It’s glass. It’s beautiful. You can respect it. Therefore you can sell it.”

Suddenly I was very tired. My stubborn resistance had given way at last under the lash of Karel’s realistic comments. I could feel my body relaxing after too great a tension, and yet my mind was fresh and newly strong. If Karel believed I could do it, I could.