NOW for the first time in my life I had more than enough money. In fact, I had plenty of money. My salary was ample, but it formed only part of my income. Everyone around me was becoming richer by the day and I saw no reason for deliberately limiting my own income to the extent of my salary. I obtained immediate news about every movement of the stock market at firsthand, so it was easy enough to fill out a white form for a large purchase in the morning and use it legitimately for my own profit.

I suppose no two men react in the same manner to the acquisition of money after a long period of poverty. Everyone I knew was spending the last cent of his ample salary and so did I, as fast as I could. I had promised Mother many years before never to gamble with cards; it set her mind at rest whenever she tended to worry about the possibility of my inheriting my father’s weakness for big stakes. And I never did. But all my life I have gambled with my career.

Instead of hoarding my income I ordered custom-made suits from the best tailors in Prague, lots of suits and fine accessories to match. I sent Mother for the first real holiday of her life to spend the summer at Franzensbad, and I joined her there for my own vacation. Then I tried to persuade her to let me rent a larger apartment in a better section of the city, but she was adamant in her refusal to make such a change. She had no desire for a finer home. She was completely happy where we were. I think, too, she was more than a little afraid of having to learn new habits. She also maintained that the old apartment of two rooms in Smichov was filled with memories which she might lose if we disposed of all the old furniture and began a new life in strange surroundings. Whenever I bought her a new dress she worried about the cost, never able to realize that she had enough money now to buy cupboards full of new clothes. Poverty had become to her like a pain inseparable from her being. She was endlessly proud of me and my work, but she was unable to admit that it meant the end of hardship and want. Without the necessity for denial, she would feel deprived of her reason for living.

At the bank I watched with consuming interest the reaction of my associates to the increasing fortunes they were making on the stock market. Executives leased apartments in buildings constructed by fashionable and expensive architects. They filled them with tremendously costly and ugly furniture. When one of the managers of the bank moved into his new apartment in a building with three floors, he immediately had an elevator installed at his own expense to save him the necessity of walking up two flights. The libraries in these apartments were alike—shelves of leather-bound books unmarred and uncut. Many of these men had never opened a book in their lives and were not likely to start the habit now. With their new houses furnished and their wives attired in fine clothes, they went on to buy the most expensive cars on the market, but they were always careful to park them on a side street behind the bank, away from the eyes of curious clients.

I watched all this with three parts amusement and one part envy. And yet I respected Mother’s desire to remain where she was, so nothing more was said about our moving. I was still far from satisfied with myself; I wanted much more than money. Not even added power which money might eventually give me offered promise. There was something lacking in my life that was more important than any of these things and I had to find out what it was. I could express it for myself in the simplest of terms: I longed for more of life to live. I wanted a wider and wider world in which to find a complete expression of myself, but just what that form of world would be and what I specifically wanted to express I had no idea.

So I continued to embrace life in terms of the 1920’s, with ardor and a flourish of splendid recklessness. I became as familiar with dawn as I was with noon.

The attitude of the young man in Europe to night life, both before the old war and after it, has been more talked of in America than understood. Because puritanism is the backbone of Anglo-American culture, neither Englishmen nor Americans have realized how thoroughly Europeans have understood and accepted the Greek conception of the orgy.

Fundamentally, Europe has always been a man’s world, in which the family was all-important. In ancient times the orgy was arranged as a religious rite, created to act as a safety valve for the male animal’s recurrent impulse to kick over the traces of civilization, to return to his primitive memory as a hunter, as a free man without responsibilities. In ancient Greece whole villages and towns, at set seasons, went wild in the bacchanalia. The mardi-gras is a survival, in a diluted form. Even in England it can be seen occasionally in bump-suppers at Oxford and Cambridge when for a single night an entire college is allowed to celebrate a victory by getting drunk. In America, where racial traditions are mixed, the bacchanalia survives sub rosa at conventions.

In modern Europe private orgies became systematized, at least by the upper classes. Realizing there was no longer a place for the goat’s foot in urban life, Europeans compromised. Young men were expected and encouraged to sow wild oats in their early twenties, for if they did not, outbreaks were apt to occur in their forties which might endanger careers and families. The French grand bourgeois or the Austrian count who arranged for his son to have a mistress was merely taking out an insurance policy on his son’s career and the safe continuance of his family.

In the new Europe that blossomed after the war, such stable arrangements seldom existed. The old nobility could no longer afford them and the new bourgeoisie were too busy with the present to worry about the future. A new streamlined night life stepped into the vacuum and tried to fill it, answering the returning soldier’s need for superinduced excitement. Those of us who were an integral part of this spectacle in Prague had no way of comparing ourselves with the ages, nor did we think then that we should eventually be embalmed for posterity by Bruce Lockhart. We were having what we took to be a wonderful life, and that was enough for us to think about at the time.

It was a voluptuous world, full of underlying tragedy and frustration, masked by a modern hardness more superficial than real. Its big moments were seen by brains excited by alcohol, ready to exaggerate or depreciate the merit of the performers according to the mood of the moment. It was punctuated by the last cries of the wild old gypsy life of middle and eastern Europe, more poignant than ever because instinctively we knew the world would never see its like again.

In retrospect, I can understand what a strong social and cultural influence these night clubs produced on me. There were specific reasons why this was so in my case, of course. In the first place, I had outgrown the two rooms in Smichov, but I felt at home nowhere else. My social life was completely formless, and I was a man with an exuberant nature. So the night clubs became my only home, and I learned to be master in it.

But there was another reason, too—the unique quality of night club entertainment in Prague after the war. Before the war Prague had been quiet, sturdy and dull. By the end of the war it boasted a score of night clubs known throughout Europe for their brilliant entertainment and their own brand of smartness, patronized by international figures with a taste for excitement. But essentially these clubs belonged to the young men of Prague.

In Berlin the term Nachtlokal became known popularly as Naktlokal, for stiff Prussian discipline broke down into gross and drunken orgies where women and often men were stark naked. One seldom heard of famous performances in Berlin; one heard much of naked flesh and indecent lebende Bilder. In London, the British made of their night clubs what one would expect; they were expensive, second-rate and dull. In Paris they were chi-chi; tourists found that sleekly manicured men in dinner jackets sitting next to them at a bar were pimps waiting to show the way to a brothel next door or upstairs. In New York they were smoke-filled basement holes, winked at by a law which forbade their existence.

In Prague the growth of the night clubs was somewhat different. Few, if any, cabarets can compare in art to the theater, but in Czechoslovakia they came close to it. The frontier world of old folk music and folk dances was at our back door, and this fact gave us a richer heritage to draw upon in our city night life. If we were not the night club center of the world, we were close to it. To us came great actresses, singers and dancers who had made their names in Vienna, Berlin, St. Petersburg, Budapest and Paris. Eventually Negro jazz bands found their way to us from the States. But it was the Czech and Viennese musicians, born of music-loving peoples, who dominated the cabarets with their own peculiarly intoxicating rhythms. If any one thing differentiated the night life of Prague from that of other capitals, it was this.

The rest of the world thinks of Czech music as that of Dvořák and Smetana; we knew these two composers as part only of a deeply rooted national culture. The Czech heart sings and cherishes the songs of our people, and the cabarets of Prague reflected our taste. Gypsy music we considered artificial and overdone; sugary Viennese lieder seemed to us symptomatic of a decadent empire; Negro jazz was noisy and amusing but not understood. Yet the loudest drunk would become quiet and stop to listen when one of the musicians began to play a Chopin waltz or a folk song of Dvořák in the early hours of the morning.

There was the Chapeau Rouge, small and exclusive, offering no program and no hostesses. We went there to hear Wolff, a round, curly haired genius who became the rage of Central Europe before his career was ended. All night long he sat at the piano in his velvet jacket, drinking brandy which was sent by his admirers. Whenever the offerings ran low he began to shout “cognac—cognac” through the words of a song. It was here that I first ran into Bruce Lockhart, Count Sternberg with his wooden leg, and the brothers Doubek, whom we considered arbiters of good taste.

There was the Sekt Pavilion where crowds of bar girls were employed to wangle drinks and tips from the customers. Like Boccaccio’s and Esprit, they put on a new show every few weeks. Zavřel’s was the place where the barman presided over a continual crap game; half a million crowns lost or won in a few throws of the dice were ineffectual in changing his expression. At the Restaurant Elner I saw pink stockings for the first time on the legs of a Vanderbilt as she came to the table next to mine with her new husband, who was a member of the staff of the British Embassy. Until that night, stockings in our world had been only dark or white.

Of all the clubs, the Alhambra was our favorite. Unlike so many of the others, a stage occupied one side of the huge room, a long American bar another. Around the dance floor were tables for tourists and the uninitiated because we considered that dancing was only for the unsmart. Boxes lined the walls in tiers, and here the knowing young habitués reserved their favorite locations for the season. This main room held some eight hundred guests, for the Alhambra occupied the major portion of the basement floor of the Hotel Passage (later called the Ambassador) on Wenzeslaus Square. Beyond was the smaller Chinese Pavilion, open as a rule only to those who were personally known to the management.

I had fallen into the habit of dropping in at the Alhambra bar every afternoon at four o’clock with Stefan and Jiří after the bank closed. Jiří had already joined his father’s firm and Stefan was leaving the bank soon. Because they could speak only Czech and German, they took no interest in the other habitual patrons of the bar who represented the international set in Prague at that time. I fell into conversation with some of the men of the foreign missions and through them I met a number of the younger diplomats. Stefan and Jiří found my new acquaintances dull, so they went their own way. New acquaintances turned into friends, and before I realized what had happened, I was an accepted member of a group of men who were stimulating as well as amusing. In fact, they were as intoxicating to me as strong drink.

There was Captain Gaston Chedeville of the French military mission. He wore civilian clothes which seemed to us effeminate and overdone. No one mentioned it, but we all knew he was a member of the Deuxième Bureau; part of each day he devoted to affairs at police headquarters and his nights were spent exclusively in the cabarets; his main interest centered on the German dancers. General H. E. Rozet had been commander of a French Foreign Legion regiment in the war; he wore a square red beard, a gold-rimmed monocle on a black silk ribbon, and strong perfume; he reminded me incessantly of one of de Maupassant’s heroes. With him always was Captain Prunet, a florid, stocky fellow with fat jowls, round glasses and a constant smile; he nourished a deep attachment for the of the Czech dancers at the Alhambra. Monsieur Dunal wore the large red button of the Legion d’Honneur in his lapel and was addressed by everyone as Monsieur le Commandant; at this time he was engaged in transactions with the Czech government on behalf of a large French industry.

No one had to push these Frenchmen into a political discussion. They were full of pathos about the war, placing permanent emphasis on the unique importance of their military victory. I seldom saw one of them drunk. Probably it was a kind of stinginess, without regard for the fact that their French franc and the size of their incomes gave them plenty to spend. But it made for good talk, and that was what I wanted just then more than anything else.

Through this group of men I learned how provincial the life of Prague had always been in comparison with the nonchalant and sophisticated ways of Paris and London. I also managed to acquire a wider understanding of world history than lectures in school or my own reading had ever given me. I discovered the exhilaration to be found in weighing and judging divergent points of view, different qualities of mind, until independent conclusions could be reached in my own thinking which were often in direct opposition to my preconceived notions.

Among the Anglo-Saxons I came to know only one man as well as I did these Frenchmen. That was Arthur Randles, European manager of the Cunard Line. I was uncertain for quite awhile how to place him, for he was neither English nor American, though his nature seemed to derive from both. When I learned that he was a Canadian I understood the dual quality of his character. He was extremely vigorous and supplied with endless good humor. People remembered him easily because he carried on his forehead a scar received in action with the Canadians in the war. He was a natural leader of men and he spoke Czech extremely well. Above everything else, he taught us that Canadians are neither English nor American. We were known throughout the night clubs not only to the musicians and entertainers, but to other patrons as well, for we considered ourselves masters of the variations and nuances of this hectic life. Whenever we joined a party, the spirits of the group rose; whenever we found a new band or a new drink or a new actress to admire, the band, the drink and the actress became a vogue.

I have read Bruce Lockhart’s Retreat from Glory more than once, in German and in English, and I still doubt if he learned half as much about my countrymen as we learned about England from him and his compatriots in our midst.

When the Englishmen and Americans first came to us we were ready to be impressed by them. They represented not only two victorious nations in the war, but also two of the richest countries in the world. We watched them outbuy everyone else with only a small bundle of bank notes which they carried in their trouser pockets. The rate of exchange was greatly in their favor, but we could hardly blame them for that. It was their mission and they fulfilled it with ease. Our disillusionment came later when we found them not only uninformed about the most obvious facts of history and politics in Central Europe, but totally disinterested in rectifying their ignorance.

Then we began to realize that in their own minds the British considered all other peoples to be their inferiors. We were all right to drink with, and our girls were fine for flirtations, but they fell into a blank silence of annoyance whenever we tried to talk of world affairs, as though we had committed an unpardonable breach of social conduct. The Americans were equally unwilling to bring their conversation to anything remotely resembling a serious level. To them, America was the best old country in the world and they felt sorry for everyone who wasn’t fortunate enough to live there. Pressed for reasons for such an admirable loyalty, they were glib in the use of superlatives in describing the United States, as though they had learned their facts by rote in school. But somehow their ignorance of all matters outside their own country, which might have formed a basis of comparison, left us unimpressed by their ready words of self-appraisal.

I can be amused now at the gross misdemeanor we committed in the eyes of the Englishmen by our tendency to consider the Americans and British the same kind of men. We found it extremely difficult to differentiate between them. Americans were not arrogant in their manners like the English, but they talked louder about themselves and it added up to the same thing in our minds. Even the effect of alcohol on them was the same. Both Americans and Englishmen lost their indifference to other kinds of people as soon as they became high. Then they could outdo even my own countrymen, for all our mercurial temperament, in their gay good nature because they were no longer afraid to let themselves be charming and lovable. So we tended to prefer their company in the early hours of the morning.

It is obvious that besides the entertainment and drug value of this existence it provided a measure of education into the ways and manners of other countries. A young man can become an intimate with a stiff English diplomat in the small hours in a night club, particularly when the Englishman is in a foreign land, as he could no place else. One recalls that famous English quotation: “It was in another country, and besides, the wench is dead. . . .” There were, of course, a dozen other languages and nationalities with us in those years of the 1920’s. Yugoslavs, Poles, Swedes, Hollanders, East Indians, Danes, Egyptians and a score more moved through our nights, but Randles, Chedeville and I could always be found together.

We played a game with each other which no one ever won. Every morning Randles and I reached our respective offices at nine o’clock, clean-shaven, well pressed and clear of head. Now and then we called each other as we began our day’s work. Then Chedeville would make his rounds, first to one of us and then to the other, bringing his pretty manners to see if he could once win this game by finding us not at work on time. He never did, for we were young, healthy and determined in this matter of keeping our private affairs separate from our work.

I must mention one other man who was important to me in those days. He gave me the last bit of assistance I needed to gain complete confidence in myself. I met Count Willy Kolovrat first through the beautiful Martina, one of the dancing stars of that time. He spoke to her in passing as she sat beside me at a dinner party, she introduced us, and from that night until he left Prague some six years later, our friendship was unbroken.

Kolovrat was a member of one of the oldest families of Czech nobility. The family mansion stood below the Hradčany in Malá Strana, but he maintained his own apartment on the side of the hill. He was fifteen years my senior. Too many of his own generation had gone in the war, and thus he drifted into a younger crowd. He had unlimited time at his disposal, but he was not a happy man for he could never make a final adjustment with the postwar world. He was tall, strong, kindly and attractive, with white-blond hair and freckles across his nose. He spoke eight languages fluently and walked like a cavalry officer, which in fact he had been. One leg was always kicking an invisible saber out of his way.

We fell into the habit of walking home together every dawn across the Národní most as far as the point on the other side of the river where he went one way to Malá Strana and I turned left toward Smichov. Half the time when we reached the place of parting, we turned back over the bridge in order to prolong our talk. Though I am notably stubborn and proud, Kolovrat was able to do for me something which no one else could have done. In such a way that I never felt corrected, he showed me each of my slightest mistakes in manner, movement or speech made during the preceding night.

Such delicate distinctions are important in Europe, far more important than an American or an Australian, for instance, can ever realize. One man knows instantly of another man exactly where he belongs in the social world by the way his white tie is worn, how he holds his wineglass, the height at which he raises a woman’s hand in kissing it, and the amount of understatement he uses in praising his current passion. Kolovrat enabled me to hurdle this social barrier.

Wherever he appeared in Prague he was greeted warmly, for underlying his perfection of manner was a grace of heart as rare as it was warm. It was essentially for this characteristic that I admired him so extravagantly. When he ordered a drink the barman forgot everyone else in the vicinity while the two discussed the ingredients of a new concoction Kolovrat had discovered somewhere, or the state of the barman’s wife’s health. In the early morning as we passed the fruit markets he always greeted the women who were setting up their stalls. They knew him as an old friend and invariably tried to press upon him flowers and fruits. Even the police in Prague saluted him because they remembered the days of the war when he had been their much-admired Rittmeister who always spoke to them in Czech. One morning at four o’clock he chased a man he disliked over the sidewalks with his Bugatti sport car, but the police waved him off when they finally caught up with him, merely suggesting that he think better of such behavior another time.

Mother adored Kolovrat, too. On a certain Sunday noon I woke up to find him sitting with her in the other room, drinking coffee and eating a large slice of bread and butter. He kept insisting it was the best breakfast he had ever tasted in his life. Mother had never met him before but they were talking as though they were old friends. I missed him greatly when his inner restlessness took him off to hunt for his own adventure in the Argentine. It was not until 1937 that we met again.