ONE day the buzzer on my desk rang to call me to the office of my chief, Hans Wissmuth. I picked up some documents I knew he was waiting to see and went in. For some time now I had been entertained in his home, where I had met many of the men in foreign financial circles whom I would otherwise not have known. But during banking hours our relations were as formal as ever.

Would I be willing, he said now, to undertake a delicate piece of work for the bank, one which was rather unusual? There was no precedent for it, and it required the maximum of loyalty and diplomacy.

It appeared that speculations which were being made by certain large banks and groups of financial houses in Czechoslovakia had antagonized Rašín, our Minister of Finance. He was the courageous individual who saved our country from inflation at the end of the war when the currency of neighboring countries was being rapidly debased. Now he had no intention of watching his work ruined from within, so without warning he had put a deputation of accountants into every bank in Prague to revise and control any business transaction which might jeopardize the safety of the currency. For the length of the stay of the five men assigned to the Associated Bank, the board of directors wished me to hold the title of secretary to the board in order that I might serve as liaison between the Minister’s men and themselves.

I asked Wissmuth for more details of the work expected of me before I agreed to his suggestion. An enormous standing reward had been posted by the government, he told me, for information leading to detection of any break in the law on the part of any bank in any of its transactions. There were some fifteen hundred employees in the central branch of our bank, and some one of them might well be tempted to falsify a record for the purpose of collecting the reward. It was to guard against this possibility that the board of directors felt they must have someone they could trust implicitly to represent them and keep in constant touch with the work of the five-man commission as long as it remained in the bank.

The advantage in this investigation was unquestionably on the side of the deputation, for not only were these five ambitious young men out to earn their personal laurels, they also had the might of the state behind them in every decision they were prepared to make. The bank felt its strongest counterweight would be the presence of someone at these investigations who was not only trustworthy, but also familiar with all departments of the organization.

I accepted the appointment and for five weeks I stayed on the heels of the commission. Ten years later I saw one of these five men become director of the National Bank of Czechoslovakia, a sort of minor Montagu Norman. By 1943 I met him again when he had become a refugee from Hitler, bitter and old and friendless.

At the conclusion of the investigation the Associated Bank was exonerated by the Minister of Finance. The board of directors mopped their collective brows, informed me that I had been praised by the commission for my tact, and to show their own gratitude they asked if I would be willing to accept a permanent appointment as secretary to the board. I found myself remembering the day when I had applied for a job in the bank only three years before. I accepted the appointment and moved to a desk in the heavily carpeted inner office of the board in the directors’ wing of the bank.

With this last rise both in salary and status I should have been well satisfied, yet I was not. I was proud of myself, for I have as much vanity as any man. But I realized now as I never had before that only a portion of myself could be used by the bank, no matter how much they were prepared to require of me. Another part of my being was still hungry, still searching for expression in another kind of world.