EGYPT was next. In the early spring of 1930 the Egyptian Legation in Prague was moved from a suite of rooms at the Ambassador Hotel to a new building. The Czechoslovakian Chief of Protocol, Minister Strimpl, brought to the shop Dr. Hassan Nashât Pasha, Egyptian Ambassador to Berlin, and Serri Omar Bey, the Egyptian Minister to Czechoslovakia. As a result of this visit we furnished a complete set of table glass for the new legation.

Shortly thereafter it was announced that King Fouad of Egypt was coming to Prague to celebrate the official opening of the new legation, and great plans were being made to entertain him. On the first night of his visit a diplomatic reception was scheduled to be held in his honor at the legation. President Masaryk would receive at the King’s side.

Two days before the event I happened to meet Serri Omar Bey and learned from him that the legation was in a frenzied state because the rooms where King Fouad would hold court were still incomplete. The decorations which had been ordered from Paris had not arrived. Without asking permission of my factory in Carlsbad, or even waiting to get in touch with the bank, I offered my services on the spot, suggesting that we put at his disposition the most beautiful pieces of crystal in our collection to decorate the salons and presentation rooms during the King’s visit.

The Egyptian Minister studied me obliquely from the corner of his dark eyes. “It is a possibility,” he said. “And what would be your charge for such a service?”

I explained that my firm would be honored by such a showing. The opportunity to place these pieces of hand-engraved crystal where they would serve as background for the presence of the King of Egypt and the President of Czechoslovakia would be ample reward in itself. Serri Omar Bey was pleased to accept my offer.

All that night and all the next night Beranová and I worked in the Egyptian Legation. We were given an unlimited account for all the flowers we could use. Here and there and everywhere we placed rich blooms, filling blank spaces and arranging vistas, making background interest and foreground interest and always remembering that the clear crystal itself was a decoration fit for any king’s taste. Because we were so intensely interested in solving this problem, we had no sense of fatigue. Servants brought us food on trays now and then; otherwise we lost track of time.

Through the hours I was constantly conscious of Milada’s hands. I found I couldn’t keep my eyes from their delicate grace as they brought to life each piece of glass she chose for a table, a shelf, a window sill, a mantel. She filled the vases with white lilacs, purple lilacs, yellow and cream daffodils, crimson tulips, saffron tulips, and gorgeous hothouse roses. And always the slim, cool fingers chose the right length of stem, the right number for each vase, making arrangements to promote the best in both flowers and crystal container.

One small room was pointed out to us as the place reserved for King Fouad and President Masaryk in which to hold their private conversations. It contained little more than a sofa in the shape of a crescent and a taboret standing beside it. We spent at least an hour discussing the color of the vase and the kind of flowers to go in this room; which crystal cigarette box and which ash try would be most appropriate. When we found the right combination to suit us, and arranged the pieces on the taboret, we were finished.

From that day on, our business with the diplomatic corps was assured. The manner in which I had helped the Egyptian Legation became a public secret, and ministers, consuls and attaches from every legation in Prague were our constant visitors, characterizing us as friends of the foreign colony. Even the Czechoslovakian Foreign Office, and eventually the President’s office, came to hear of the incident. Before it was forgotten again in the press of new business and new customers, word reached me from the Hradčany that my understanding help had been appreciated at home as well as abroad.

And then in April, 1930, I was called to Carlsbad, where I was informed that the executive board of the factory had nominated me to fill a new position as head of all the branches of Carlsbad Crystal, my salary to be increased considerably and my headquarters to be in the resort town.

My emotions were something more than mixed as I returned to Prague and set about searching for someone to succeed me as manager of the Příkopy branch. First I offered the job to Karel, but he laughed in my face. He admitted that he possessed neither the patience nor the diplomacy necessary to enable him to carry on where I was forced to leave off. Finally Jiří Mašek, one of my first friends in the bank, one of the men who had introduced me to Prague night life, agreed to take it over. His temperament was well suited to dealing with a variety of people, and he was still sufficiently capable of being impressed by important names to feel that I had deeded him a gold mine.

For two weeks he worked with me in the little back room, learning how I handled every detail. And then I went off to Carlsbad, feeling much as though I were giving away a child. I left Milada, Božena and Novotný with regret, but I thought of them as safeguards for the evolution of the business. I knew they loved the child as much as I did.

It took less than a week in Carlsbad for me to discover that I had been kicked upstairs. My title indicated that I was head of all branches, but actually I was Rudolf’s assistant.

Lorentz Meyer kept aloof from all discussions of business. He showed me his new ideas for designs and discussed their market possibilities. He recognized the fact that I loved his crystal and respected his workmanship and talent. The other two, together with lesser executives, presented a united front against the intruder from Prague. Every suggestion I made was promptly vetoed. Every inspection I made in a branch brought on quarrels and private complaints to Rudolf Meyer or Bělský.

Had I been a Frenchman I could have shrugged my shoulders and given in to the inevitable. But I was not even a philosophic Slav to the extent that my predecessor in Prague had been, finding a way to mock himself and everyone else in a similar position. I had formed a passionate regard for crystal—for the crystal of Lorentz Meyer specifically—and I knew it held great possibilities for serving my inner needs as well as the reputation of my country in world markets. I had no intention of giving up the relationship I had managed to establish with it.

Now I spent as much time in the factory as I could, watching the glass blowers at work, talking to them, learning something of the technicalities of their craft, truly admiring their skill and the manner in which they expressed pride in their work. A great many of them were Czechs, but I saw no dissension between them and the German workers; they were all Social Democrats. Gradually they began to express their friendliness in small ways, by a twinkle in a pair of eyes as I walked through the rooms, by a chuckle when I spoke to a man at one of the furnaces. Sometimes a worker would jump down from the platform before his furnace as I passed and thrust a box into my hands. The contents were always amusing glass animals which had been made in spare time as a mark of affection. By a grapevine route of their own they had known which orders came from my branch in Příkopy. These animals were a way of saying that they considered the Prague orders artistic and worthy of their efforts.

Whenever visitors came to the factory—and it was a customary practice in those days to welcome anyone who wanted to inspect Czech industry at its source—it was my duty to show them over the plant. They were a varied assortment, from Indian potentates to American businessmen. Of them all, I remember three more clearly than the rest, for differing reasons.

One was an elderly gentleman in civilian clothes, surrounded by a group of French officers. As soon as we started through the furnace rooms and he spoke to his companions with sharp tones of command, I recognized General Franchet d’Esperey. In customary fashion, I asked if he would like to blow a piece of glass. Most of our distinguished visitors were pleased to be asked, but few availed themselves of the privilege. Not so the general. He got onto the platform by the stove, took the blowpipe which was reserved for such occasions, received a drop of liquid glass on its tip and began to blow into a wooden form until his face was purple. He was enormously pleased with himself.

I promised to send the tumbler to his hotel in Carlsbad as soon as it had cooled. But when it was taken from the mold it was a badly misshapen article of ugliness. I said to the blower who had assisted in the ceremony, “He was my general in the war. What would you do?”

The old fellow let his face break slowly into a grin. Without a word he blew another drop of glass into the mold. When it was ready we took it to one of the engravers and had the general’s initials carved on its face. In due time it was put into his hands as the product of his own skillful breath. He accepted it with a smile as he said, “Enfin . . . it is not too difficult, your glass blowing!”

I remember, too, an earnest, quiet woman who came alone to visit us one day. She said very little as we went from room to room, but her few questions were indicative of a deep feeling for social problems, and her responses to my comments were sharply colored by wit. She was a Doctor of Philosophy, president of the Czechoslovakian Red Cross, and daughter of the president of the country . . . Dr. Alice Masaryk.

A third vivid memory from that period was my first encounter with an Indian prince. The Maharajah of Tripura, a pompous brown man, came to the factory with his entire gaudy retinue. After the party had inspected the glass blowers at work, the maharajah indicated his desire to look at samples of crystal ware with a view to giving an order. I led them to the showroom and brought out for the Indian’s consideration one of the finest pieces of craftsmanship we possessed, a baroque goblet, while his entourage rattled and swished through the room. He looked at the piece I held out and then disdainfully pushed my hand aside. He walked away and began to look at other pieces. One of his attendants whispered in a high-pitched, quite audible voice, “His Highness is very wealthy. He can afford the best. Only the best may be shown him.”

So I offered the maharajah a goblet heavily encrusted with gold. The fine transparency of the glass was lost in its decoration. It was exactly what he wanted. He gave a large order for his palace, specifying that the only clear space remaining on the glass was to be enameled in colors with his coat of arms.

During that summer in Carlsbad I was more concerned with observing the Sudeten Germans and their relations with Czechs than I was with anything else. I remembered the two years I had spent in Slovakia at the end of the war and all the mistakes in tact and diplomacy I had seen made there in those early days of welding together a republic. Here the reasons for dissension were obviously of another nature. In the eyes of the German-speaking section of the population, Czechs in the Sudetenland were weak because of their determination to be considerate and friendly in what they thought was a true democratic manner. As a result, the Germans scorned them. It made me acutely ill to watch the whole unhappy scene.

Carlsbad was in full season now. It had been ugly enough in the middle of winter when everything was boarded tight, but now in July it was despoiled by too many visitors who were discontented, avaricious, quarrelsome, overfed, sticky with gossip, and bored to the bone. I avoided every aspect of their so-called gay life, playing no morning golf, no afternoon bridge, drinking no pink teas and frequenting no bars. I eschewed the tea dances at the Imperial which were obligatory for Carlsbad society, and I never appeared at the more formal dances at the Pupp Hotel.

Night after night during those summer weeks I sat alone on a bench on the Alte Wiese, smoking in the dark, wondering if the evolution of my career had become systematic in its periods of rise and fall. Was there a loose thread that I had not been able to find in the pattern, a thread that came unraveled at intervals? If that were true, then I must find it and knit it back, for I couldn’t afford to let this rise and fall continue forever. And the time to find the raveled thread was now.

I began to analyze myself and my own qualities ruthlessly. In no sense of the word was I a professional man. It was too late to acquire a specialized knowledge equivalent to that of a doctor or lawyer. It was equally doubtful if I could ever qualify as a technical expert in the highly difficult and complex art of glass-making and designing. But I did see, in all modesty, that I possessed certain advantages the pure technician rarely has. For one thing, I had built up a large knowledge of people.

Some men are born shrewd, some achieve shrewdness, and some have caution thrust upon them. Most of the individuals I knew fell into one or the other of these categories. Karel had been born shrewd; Rée Berlin had shrewdness forced upon her by the circumstance of being a beautiful young dancer performing in a man’s world. Whatever caution and even shrewdness I now possessed had been acquired through a slow and painful process.

The first steps toward consciously acquiring a mental equipment to protect myself from others, as well as from my own nature, had begun when I was at my lowest ebb in Paris. During the past fourteen months I had added a further store. Once upon a time I would have resigned my position with the Meyers at the slightest hint that I was unwanted. Today I had no intention of doing anything of the kind. My career made coherent sense to me for the first time in my life, and I was resolved to do whatever I must to stay with this work which had acquired meaning for me far beyond the salary it paid.

The days were warm in Carlsbad that summer, but the nights were fresh and cool in the darkness under the old trees. I badly needed someone to talk to, but all around me were only the bored and boring rich and the natives who were busy serving them. In Paris I had often been alone, but the situation was different there. I had never lost the consciousness of being in a foreign country; its strange manners and customs were a drug to my mind; I was in it but never of it. Here in Czechoslovakia I was newly conscious of being at home and also of having an added mental equipment with which to analyze the life that went on about me. I wanted to know more about my country, to understand it better, because in spite of everything I was happy in it and I had no wish to leave it again.

The thought of my father was often in my mind that summer. He had spent many years of his life and all his money in the casinos of Carlsbad. He must have known the place well. What had gone on in his mind in those years before he met and married my mother? I could only guess, for she had seldom talked about him. Thomas Masaryk had outlawed all games of chance in the spas of the country, but what other and more fundamental differences had come about in my world to make it unlike the one my father had known? How would Czechoslovakia look to him if he could peer out from wherever he was and see it now? It was a democracy and no longer part of the Austrian Empire, but what did that mean in my life? How much had I come to take for granted in this democracy?

The foreigners who visited our factory were always curious to know many details about the evolution of Czechoslovakia. They asked for statistics and proved facts in the fields of education, agriculture, economics, health insurance and so on. They wanted to know how it felt to live in a democracy after having been part of an empire. I was never able to give them statistical data because I had never bothered to read parliamentary reports or any other kind of social publications. I felt these princes and other important personages could send their secretaries to borrow voluminous reports from the library if they were unable to read the answers they sought in the happy faces of Czechoslovakians all around them. As for telling them how it felt to live in a democracy, I could say honestly that it felt fine. But I had come to take it so much for granted that I could hardly realize it had ever been any other way.

Now during these long nights alone in Carlsbad I began to probe deeper within my own mind. If democracy could not be given to men, but must be learned, where had I—along with all the other individuals and groups that made up my country—learned to live in harmony and fruitful enterprise? To learn means to study and to be guided to a conclusion. Perhaps we had learned the meaning of democracy unconsciously because we had all studied the ideas of Jan Hus. When he had preached in the early fifteenth century he had not called his faith democracy, but the words he used added up to the same thing—humanity, equality and freedom. Had we also been guided to a conclusion? Undoubtedly we had, for Thomas Masaryk was the ideal teacher whose hand was not felt by his pupils but whose spirit was strong enough to enter them unobserved. It was Masaryk who had said that we would need fifty years of undisturbed existence as a state to realize the full meaning of democracy. Already more than ten of those years were gone, and our life in Czechoslovakia was rich and wonderful. What added good was in store for us at the end of another forty?

Perhaps Masaryk meant that we would understand ourselves fully by that time, no longer taking our good for granted? In the meantime we took pleasure in small evidences before our everyday eyes: the fact that we were no longer working under a foreign rule gave us an impetus in business to work not only harder for ourselves but for coming generations; the opening of new schools, the giving of scholarships and prizes to large numbers of people in all parts of the country were reflected in a growing sense of our own native culture. The fact that we were no longer disguised in the eyes of the world as Austrians or Germans made us proud to show forth the best that was in us.

So I became sharply aware of my own molecular part in the harmonious whole which had been unified by the genius of Masaryk. Fine glass was potentially a part of the cultural pattern of Czechoslovakia. In time it could be so understood by the world at large. My love for it, my infinite respect for it, and my intuition told me I need do nothing except give our glass a chance to speak for itself. It was part of the way I had learned democracy, by loving many little things that added up to the big words like humanity, equality and freedom.