ON the seventh of March, 1934, a date chosen deliberately to honor the birthday of Thomas Masaryk, the new showrooms were opened. Engraved invitations had gone out for a reception in the afternoon, and long before the appointed hour the rooms were ready. Milada and I walked through them together, inspecting everything ten times over. Karel Berounský joined us early in the afternoon, still carrying his old air of detached cynicism, but inwardly he was as pleased as the rest of us.

I have made little mention of Karel through these years. He remained my only intimate friend. Whenever I needed his advice it was given willingly, with the same hard core of reality, but the time had passed when I needed Karel’s point of view to bolster my confidence. Now I was the one to repay him from the store of enthusiasm in my nature which he needed to temper his own despair. As my political consciousness came into focus, we grew ever closer to a point of mutual agreement, though always I found I could test my ideas on the steel of his realism and come away with sharpened wits as a result.

The banquet hall glowed with a diffused brilliance on that opening afternoon. Pipes, radiators and unseemly wires were gone now, replaced by invisible technical devices. The wooden paneling had been cleaned to a mat finish, the ruby-glass windows brought in a faint color from the fading daylight outside. Underneath was the splendid design of the polished parquetry floors, much too fine to cover with rugs. Overhead, from the center of the high, carved ceiling hung one of the most lustrous crystal chandeliers in the whole of Europe. There were six thousand handmade pieces in it. This chandelier, together with all our lighting fixtures, had been put in free of charge by the best lamp factory in Bohemia; they hoped by such an introduction to place their products in foreign markets, and their efforts were eventually well rewarded.

Along the far wall of the banquet hall glass shelves had been built to house our museum pieces. Down the center of the room were several long tables with black glass tops, covered now with exquisite linen banquet cloths. The largest Czech manufacturer of textiles in Silesia had begged permission to supply us with his linen. In time he was also rewarded with heavy orders. On each of these tables Milada had arranged a dinner setting to show to advantage various of our best designs. The wealth of spring flowers on the tables made the room gay in color and sweet to smell.

There were nine other rooms on the same floor. A winding stairway led from the small room that had once been our only shop to a reception hall which we had furnished in the manner of a library, with tables, deep chairs, lamps and reading matter. The reception room opened into the banquet hall, and beyond this great room were two more showrooms, each with linen-covered tables on which sets could be displayed. Opening from the other side of the reception hall was the administration wing. Five secretaries occupied one large office, file clerks and bookkeepers another. Novotný had a spacious sunny office at the back of the building, with storerooms adjacent where his five assistants kept order.

Our kitchen was an innovation for Prague. It was fully equipped with stove, chairs and tables, and any member of the staff could go there at any hour of the day for relaxation, a smoke or a cup of tea. It created more of a sensation among the factory and bank officials than any other feature of the new establishment. They were almost equally impressed by Milada’s staff of six beautiful society girls, each in command of at least three languages. My secretaries were all language specialists, as well.

Of all the rooms, my own office was the smallest and contained the least furniture. My desk was the one I had first used in the old shop downstairs and the two chairs on either side of it were straight and unpadded. One glass case stood against a wall to hold a few sample pieces, and that was all there was to it. My living quarters were almost as plain. They consisted of two small rooms at the rear of the same building.

As the hour of the reception drew closer, this afternoon of the opening, I remembered my persistent feeling that music and glass have a common affinity through their rhythm and form; even the designs engraved on glass were like melodies in music. Whatever the world of trade might call me—salesman or super-showman—I felt like a conductor who was about to present to the world, through the medium of many musicians, a program of priceless beauty. My musicians were the craftsmen who had created the china and glass.

This was analogous to the moment before the lights in a concert hall wink as a warning call to stragglers, and then after a pause start to dim, throwing the focus of attention on the stage. The musicians in the orchestra are ready, the audience sighs and waits, and the conductor raises his baton. During the space of a second or two the audience watches him almost as though he were an enemy. Who is this man, they think; can he please us? Is he worthy of the music he has promised to play? The baton moves, the audience falls under the spell of concerted sound, the conductor knows it. From then on, audience and musicians are one.

No conductor, as he leads his orchestra, is conscious of selling the sounds his musicians make. He spends no time thinking of change rattling in the till of the box office. So it was with our exhibition in that hour when sleek black limousines began to arrive before our door. Correct, charming and sometimes effusive members of Prague society and the diplomatic corps climbed our carpeted stairs, drank tea, chatted, examined the handsome tables, and departed, only to be followed by more guests and still more. No money passed from the hands of the guests to mine; orders would come by mail at a later date; buying and selling was never mentioned. We were receiving friends in a showroom which had been conceived and executed as a monument to Czechoslovakian china and glass. I was only sorry that the musicians, the workers who had made these lovely articles, could not hear, or see, the total results of their craftsmanship.

Hour after hour I moved through the rooms that hummed with voices and smelled of flowers and furs. Reporters from local papers and magazines walked through the crowds, taking notes while beautiful women greeted distinguished men. Now and then I caught Milada’s calm blue eyes across a sea of faces. I was inordinately happy, and I could pretend to be nothing else.