THREE days later I left for Carlsbad on the seven o’clock train and shortly before noon I followed my luggage onto the platform at the famous spa. Somehow I had expected to find the place the way it always looked in pictures taken at the height of the season, with gardens and heavy foliage and bright sunshine and crowds of expensively dressed people of all nationalities walking up and down past the colonnade. But the station was empty, the streets around it were empty except for two horse-drawn, dirty sleighs, and a silence like death hung over the snow-covered buildings.

The train went on its way and left me standing there. From behind the freight shed two moth-eaten old men emerged to stare at me. I asked if they owned the sleighs and if one of them would drive me to the Carlsbad Crystal Factories. They mumbled together and finally one of them stalked over to one of the sleighs without giving me an answer and began to take the blanket off his horse. I got in behind and we started off down the hill toward the center of the town.

Every one of the enormous, luxurious hotels which were standing in horizontal layers were dark and their windows were tightly covered with boards. I asked my sulky driver where a stranger could stay for two weeks and for answer he drove to a small, unprepossessing inn where I left my bags and engaged a room. Then we went on. When I spoke in German I managed to get an answer to my questions now and then. I learned that most of the natives of Carlsbad went away in winter. It was their time for a vacation. Apparently those who had served the rich during the season were in turn letting others wait on them now.

The broken-down horse clopped along at his own pace through the deep snow, and the creaking sleigh jerked along behind his sweating haunches. At the bottom of a hill a narrow, cement-walled rivulet moved in a straight path through the dead town, giving off steam to prove its source in the hot springs which had made the spa famous. We crossed it, passed through the township of Fischern, and perhaps three-quarters of an hour later encountered a community of ugly suburban houses. In the bottom of a valley we drew up before a gate inscribed with the name of the factory.

The sleigh came to a halt and without turning in his seat the driver named his exorbitant fee for the ride. I had no choice but to pay and watch the horse pull him aimlessly away. Then I looked about. Beyond two rows of low brick buildings that resembled barracks and were doubtless the homes of the glassworkers I could see the factory. I began to walk in that direction, picking my way through pools of slush and mud. Some of the brick buildings of the factory were without windows, one had a huge stack rising into the air that gave off a filthy colored smoke, and all of them were scabby with peeling yellow-gray paint and great wet spots of mold on the outside walls. Except for the smoke I would have been certain the place was unused. As I came closer I could see heaps of ashes beside the building with the smokestack, and everywhere in the factory yard were great mounds of broken glass.

My heart was in my heels as I stood looking the place over. A girl came out the door of one of the buildings and when she was near enough I asked her where I could find the manager. She pointed to a three-story structure and went on her way. Once inside the administration building I found no more cordiality that I had outside. A girl seated behind a reception desk was another unfriendly creature. I gave her one of my visiting cards as I asked to see the manager, but her only response was the motion of a thumb over her shoulder pointing at a door on the other side of the room.

I opened it, thinking it led to another reception room or hall, and found myself standing in a large room dominated by a long conference table at which three men were seated. They stared at me as everyone else had done since I arrived. My first impulse was to apologize for my unannounced entrance, but I thought better of it and merely bowed slightly from the waist. As my eyes grew accustomed to the change of light I recognized one of the three men, Rudolf Meyer, head of the firm. I had met him several years before in the bank in Prague.

This glass factory was his family’s enterprise. When it became too heavily in debt to the bank it had been reorganized with a majority of the new shares now held by the bank and a minority held by the Meyers, together with one other shareholder.

Rudolf Meyer was British honorary consul in Carlsbad. His manners were elegant and aloof. He spoke with an excellent imitation of the clipped accents of British society. His suits were custom-made in Saville Row, he smoked Gold Flakes, and he kept a white handkerchief tucked up his left sleeve. He was known to be greatly in demand in Carlsbad society during the season.

He greeted me now with no trace of enthusiasm, asked me to join them at the table and then introduced the other two men. The one on his right carried the name of Edward Bělský. Though I had not previously met the fellow, I knew a great deal about him. He had been a prosperous shoe manufacturer. With a large amount of available money to invest, he had sought the advice of the securities department of the Associated Bank and after due consideration had decided to put it all into Carlsbad Crystal. But with his money had gone the stipulation that he be appointed managing director of the company in order to control its spending. He was a small, fat, melancholy man who was never seen without a smoking oversized cigar in his mouth. His whiskers were blue on his jowls and his eyes were nearly hidden under heavy brows. Like Rudolf Meyer, he made no show of being pleased to see me.

The third man was introduced as Rudolf’s older brother, Lorentz Meyer. I judged him to be about fifty. He was exceedingly lean and nervous, with strong, sharply chiseled features and clever eyes. His artist’s hands cupped his crossed knees, one of them carrying a lighted cigarette to his mouth and then quickly back again. He was the designer and chief technician of the crystal factories. He seemed to hear little of what went on around him, as though his mind were forever concerned with new patterns and ideas. His greeting was the only one free of distrust and even antipathy.

My appointment as manager of the Prague branch was discussed at once. When Bělský growled that I knew nothing about selling glass I agreed with him easily, adding that a new point of view might do no harm to their business. I was at their disposal for the next few weeks to learn about glass, from its beginning to its final merchandising. I waited for their next move. Rudolf was frigidly polite as he informed me that they were all three opposed to my appointment, but it would be foolish to waste time discussing the matter. The Associated Bank had indicated a desire for my services and under the circumstances they were helpless to disagree.

Before I could answer, Lorentz Meyer jumped up from the table with an air of nervous distaste. Sitting listening to the others talk he had appeared half asleep and utterly relaxed. Now he moved with rapid strides to a hatrack at the far end of the room, disentangled his own belongings, and with a wide sweeping gesture threw a black cape over his shoulders. He put a wide-brimmed black hat on his graying head, said “Nobody needs me here” to the wall, and went out the door.

His brother looked disdainful and Bělský shrugged his shoulders. Rudolf Meyer began to outline what he expected of me during the weeks I spent at the factory. I would follow the process of glass manufacture until I knew as much as I could gather from observation. Then their sales organization would be explained to me. I learned that their branches were in Marienbad, Franzensbad, in Prague, a small one in Carlsbad proper, and one in Paris which was the property of a third Meyer brother.

By the time he had finished, the afternoon was on its way toward dusk. He led me toward the door and halfway across the room mentioned my salary. When he named the generous figure I knew it had been determined by Hardt, for it was the exact amount of my salary at the bank before I left that organization. Bělský groaned when he heard it.

There were five hundred employees in the factory, Meyer told me as he led the way to the sample department where he decided I should start. From grandparents to children, every member of the families who lived on the property worked in one capacity or another in this plant. He went on to give me more statistics. I had eaten nothing since six o’clock that morning and I was hungry, but there was no alternative to listening and trying to extract at least a relative meaning from them.

The Czechoslovakian glass industry began in the fourteenth century when the craft of hand-blown glass was first introduced in the western borderlands of the Bohemian kingdom. It was a wild frontier country, but it offered an abundance of wood to fire the furnaces and the necessary ingredients for the glass itself. Glassmakers opened up virgin forests, built their homes around the glassworks and constructed roads to their settlements. They worked in clans to protect their craft from competition and the cost of outside help.

In the seventeenth century, when Venetian glass was the pride of every festive table in the civilized world, a new glass mixture was discovered in Bohemia. It was colorless and especially resistant to engraving, and it became known as Bohemian crystal. Another invention which contributed to the growing fame of these glassmakers was the accidental discovery in Prague of the famous gold-ruby glass coloration. From then on Bohemian crystal found its way into the markets of the world.

During the eighteenth century English lead glass became a serious competitor and to offset reverses in the Bohemian industry, young clansmen among the glassmakers were sent to foreign markets to study customs and fashions. As a result, new designs and new decorations were invented, new forms were added to old lines of samples, and a method of producing drinking glasses with one or more colored layers was discovered. One man invented a method of sandblasting and another produced a polishing process. In 1752 a royal decree prohibited the emigration of glassworkers from Bohemia.

Throughout the nineteenth century Bohemian crystal maintained its place in world markets. Modern methods and new glass products changed small glassworks into huge industrial plants. Modest experiments in special glass articles developed into important enterprises. By 1918, when the glass industry of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia was consolidated in Czechoslovakia, special schools to promote the artistic development of glassmakers were organized.

Now, in 1929, there were nearly a hundred and forty glassworks in the country where hand-blowing, glass cutting, engraving, enameling and other decorative methods were carried on. One hundred and fifty thousand glassworkers were employed. Large glassworks, such as Carlsbad Crystal, were organized for every process necessary to produce the finished article. Of them all, this place in which I had come to learn a new trade manufactured the very finest luxury items. Everything was made to order from samples; no stock was sold direct in the showrooms. By the end of the day my mind was choked with information. Rudolf Meyer had left me to the mercies of the factory executives who made no attempt whatever to help me. They spoke German exclusively and they were correct in the strictest German sense, but their cool reserve held me off as they weighed and watched me. I tried to ask questions about their work, to indicate my interest and earnest desire to learn, but they answered only in monosyllables. When the factory whistles began to blow they moved off to end their day’s routine, and I went back to the administration building.

It was completely dark outside now and the workers were scattering fast to their homes. All lights were out in the administration building. I returned to the sample department and found two young men putting on their coats. When I asked them to tell me how to get back to Carlsbad they looked at each other, shrugged their shoulders, and one said that a bus ran every hour on the main road. He pointed in an oblique direction and they went off together in the dark.

I started to pick my way over the unfamiliar path through snow and slush, trying to follow the direction they had given me. I plodded along in the dark, feeling that my future was as black as the night, when suddenly the road went away from under me and I found myself falling. I came to rest on my face in half-frozen mud in a deep ditch beside the road. I crawled out on all fours and got back on the road, and after awhile I found the bus station. It was only later, in the lighted bus, that I discovered my face was bleeding and my hands were skinned under the weight of mud they carried.

When I finally reached the small hotel where my bags had been left, I was utterly miserable. Nor was my state of mind helped when I discovered on inquiry that all visitors to the Carlsbad Crystal Factories were able with no difficulty to call a taxi from the station to take them back into town. Obviously the two young men had known this when they sent me to find the bus.

Instead of several weeks, I stayed four days in Carlsbad, and then Rudolf Meyer informed me that I was to return to Prague at once to take over the showroom there. The manager whose tenure was at an end wanted to leave right away. I guessed that this was only another in a chain of moves designed to break me as quickly as possible, but I made no protest and left as I was bidden, knowing little more about glass than when I had arrived.