FOR three weeks this heady sense of excitement bore us along. By common consent, we refused to read the papers. Almost at once I went to the firm of Wall Street lawyers who had been recommended by the Woods, where I was given every possible help in setting in motion the necessary formalities for establishing the firm of Rieger, Inc.

Then I set about hunting for a suitable showroom. I knew it would be impossible to duplicate our place on Příkopy, but I was determined to find the best possible background for our products. Day after day I surveyed the business section of retail shops. I made maps and sketches and eventually decided to limit my search to the area bounded by Forty-seventh Street, Fifth Avenue, Fifty-seventh Street and Park. And after awhile I found what I wanted. There was a vacant shop on Fifth Avenue above Fifty-third with wood paneling and a fireplace. There was another on Fifty-seventh which also had certain advantages. Today they are occupied respectively by Ansonia (with a completely remodeled front) and Orrefors. Before I got around to making a decision between them, events in Europe overtook us.

We could shut our ears no longer. Day and night now we listened to the radio. Most of the commentators spoke too rapidly to allow us to follow their meaning, but after awhile we found two we could understand. Later we discovered that Americans were inclined to deplore the way they spoke. Because the morning news from Europe came in after midnight, we sat up until three and four in the morning, listening to expressions of sympathy but no assurances of help for Czechoslovakia during all those dreadful days of Godesburg and the descriptions of Mr. Chamberlain’s umbrella.

It was shortly before midnight on September twenty-first that we heard Jan Masaryk’s voice speaking from London. He might have been in the next room, the reception was so good. When he had finished, the radio crackled a bit and then another voice began to talk about a remedy for dandruff. Milada turned it off. I put my head down on the table in this strange room in a far-off country and cried.

During the rest of that night and the next day we slept a little, but mostly we just sat and stared at nothing. More than anything I had ever wanted in my life, I wanted to be in Prague at that moment. I wanted to be with Karel; I wanted to tell Milada’s brother we hadn’t walked out; I wanted to tell Novotný we were still with him. I kept seeing their faces as they had stood on the platform the morning we left. I tried to think what they were doing now, what was happening to them, how they were feeling, what they would do next.

It wasn’t until a cable came the second day after the Munich Agreement that I realized for the first time that Mr. Chamberlain’s umbrella had cracked down on my individual head, all the way across the Atlantic. Until then, I’d been too busy thinking about everyone at home. The cable was signed John and Pamela Wood and it read: Things uneasy Do nothing until advised.

Things uneasy! As I read the words an unreasoning anger swept over me, and all the sorrow I had been trying to put away for months was released. We were alone, abandoned in a foreign country. But I had no intention of staying, no matter what anyone told me to do.

There were things to do now, and doing them made me feel better. I went straight to the Czechoslovak consulate and asked to be recorded as a volunteer for any military group that might be formed outside Czechoslovakia. I was told I would be kept informed of developments. We found a small apartment on East Eightieth Street and moved into it at once. Milada was glad of the necessity for making curtains and buying the simple kitchen equipment we needed. She had never learned to cook, but she found a place to buy a Czech cookbook and began to teach herself. I wrote to Karel and to every other old friend in Prague, trying in this feeble way to let them know on paper that I was still with them and would return as quickly as possible. And gradually our days fell into a kind of routine in spite of our turbulent thoughts.

More cables came from the Woods. Each one cautioned me to do nothing until I heard from them again; they were making arrangements for the showroom to open as planned. They said it would help Czechoslovakia if I stayed where I was and told people the truth; they were pleased to have been the cause of getting us out of the country when they did.

Tell people the truth? What people? I was not in the habit of buttonholing strangers in a hotel lobby, in a barbershop, or in a restaurant to talk about the shameful treatment accorded my people. We had a portfolio of letters of introduction to prominent Americans, but it was never in our nature to ask friends of friends to help us, and now more than ever we hesitated to ask anyone to give us a hearing.

Already I knew, from the few men I had met in business, that Czechoslovakia was a long way from America, and that one refugee looked much like another in their eyes. The fact that we were not refugees of our own volition made no sense to them. On the few occasions when I did make a tentative statement about the situation in Europe, in the hope of being given an opportunity to expand my facts, I might as well have dropped a pebble in a bottomless pit. No one believed me. I could see it in their eyes even when their lips smiled. I was just another emotional foreigner with a gripe against my neighbors who were always fighting among themselves anyway.

No one appeared capable of distinguishing between truth and lies. If you repeated a lie often enough and loud enough, that made it so. It was frightening. If they couldn’t see the truth when I told it, how would they ever learn to recognize a lie? In time, more lies were going to pour in on them, just as they had on us. We had been too polite to answer back. Watching the indifference around me I was terrified and sick and afraid.

What did they mean when they called me a foreigner? Someone whose practical experience had been different from their own? Or one whose judgments were inimical to their particular set of values? It was so much more than a matter of tongue. I was a foreigner because on the deep plane of subconscious truth we could never meet.

Each day had twenty-four hours to get through, and the next day had the same. Sometimes it was even worse to be with Milada than to be alone, because her presence filled me with guilt for having brought her away from her beloved Prague. All around us were New York faces: kind, vacant, tired or gay faces, but nowhere was there a friend. Somewhere, somehow I must find one person, one man, one woman who could hear my wordless cry, who could tell me what I must do. But I was a foreigner, and that made me strange and condemned to walk alone.

A letter finally came from the Carlsbad Factories, telling me that arrangements could be made to send their crystal to Prague and from Prague to me. The money for it must go to them direct, because that was Hitler’s order. I threw the letter in the wastebasket. No word ever came from the Bohemian Works.

Then I heard that Hardt had left the country. It was believed he had gone to Canada. No word came from him. I was told that my successor in the Příkopy showroom had jumped from an upper window in a Prague hotel because he was a Jew and felt he was trapped. He was replaced at once by a Sudeten German. Already the Gestapo was in control of Prague, though officially they stayed twenty miles away. Masaryk had resigned his post at the Court of Saint James’s in protest over the Munich Agreement, and it was rumored that Beneš and his cabinet had left Prague.

Karel was bitter and sarcastic in his letters. I even went to the extent of getting an affidavit for him, through all the rigmarole of sending him passage to New York. But when it reached him he sent it back, thanking me politely with the comment that he was where he belonged and where he wanted to be. He saw nothing in England, France or the United States that was worth trying to save oneself to get.

Every letter I received was like a blow in the face. Every day added to piled up confusion and despair. Somewhere, somehow I must find someone to talk to, someone who could advise me what I must do. The Woods said I couldn’t leave New York, and yet both our factories were now in the hands of the Reich. The Czechoslovak consulate said I should stay where I was. And all I wanted to do was to go home.

Then one day Milada and I received an invitation to dine with Clare and Henry Luce. By that time I had gathered some idea of the fame of these two people in the United States. We accepted the invitation, not because we felt we could add gaiety to a party, but simply because I desperately wanted to ask their advice, to have them tell me their tempered opinion about the future of my country, about the hope of the world and all of us in it.

Clare Luce was very beautiful that night, and Milada was lovely across the table where she sat beside our host. Because we were Czechs and still conscious of the manners of our people, we felt it would be impolite to talk about ourselves or even about our country until the subject was broached by someone else. And our hosts doubtless felt it was only polite not to mention our personal attitude toward the Munich Agreement or to ask questions about our private plans, since politics have become like religion, a matter of emotion rather than logic.

A fragrant plate of roast Long Island duckling was put before me. I came out of my tense waiting long enough to realize that it was something new, something that smelled exceedingly good. And I was hungry. But my throat was too tight to eat. Until the subject foremost in all our minds was mentioned, I couldn’t swallow a bite. Somebody must speak of world politics, say something to give me a chance to ask my questions, or I would disintegrate with the weight of unreleased worry.

Around the table knives began to cut slices of duck and the aroma was maddening. Mrs. Luce turned to me, waiting for a reply to a question I hadn’t heard. I hoped my face gave none of my thoughts away. I heard myself saying in smooth, measured phrases, because my English is always inadequate under the stress of emotion, “Has it occurred to you that Czechoslovakia may decide to collaborate fully with Germany now? We have a saying in our country about howling with the wolves.”

All knives and forks at the table were laid down on plates. All eyes looked at me. I fancied everyone was relieved to have the name of our country mentioned, and that I had done it. But Milada was distressed.

Mr. Luce disagreed, he said, and added that he gathered I was exaggerating. He thought too well of Czechoslovakia to believe such a thing could possibly take place. I replied that bitterness and injustice can make any group of men react against their inner conscience. I felt it quite possible that Czechs would prefer to collaborate with Germany now, rather than wait for any more blows from those she had considered her loyal allies.

I said these things not so much because I believed them as to provoke a continued discussion which would refute me. Somewhere, somehow at this table I must find my answer. But it was Milada who contradicted me. She began to explain in her sweet, confident voice that I must not be taken seriously. Never on earth would Czechs join the Nazis of their own will.

Seeing what they took to be a disagreement between us, our hosts changed the subject at once. I looked down at my plate, only to discover that the untouched food had been whisked away. After dinner there was no further opportunity for discussion. Almost immediately we were rushed off to a performance of “Oscar Wilde.” Nothing could have been less likely to hold my interest that night, but that was hardly the fault either of Robert Morley or Mr. and Mrs. Luce. I would gladly have stepped onto the stage to interrupt the performance in order to tell what I knew to be true about my country, and in turn to ask if anyone could tell me what was going to happen next. But no one would have waited to hear. I was only a foreigner in evening dress, sitting with the Luces. Not even their kindness was able to reach me that night.

The same sort of thing happened again when Mrs. Manville returned to New York. We dined with her in her apartment in the Savoy-Plaza. I was eager to hear what was being said in London, but this time I determined to wait until the end of the meal before provoking a discussion. Mrs. Manville was a kindly person, full of good intentions. She said, “How do you like New York?” and “My, isn’t Tommy a naughty boy?” She couldn’t understand why we had moved to East Eightieth Street. We ought to get an apartment in Essex House; it would be so much nicer for us there.

The meal was hardly over before we were whisked off to a box in the diamond horseshoe at the Metropolitan. I have no idea what opera was sung that night. When it was over we were taken back to our own door, feeling lonelier and more forlorn than ever.

After that we began to refuse invitations. It seemed senseless to accept hospitality when we were in no mood either to enjoy it or to repay it later.