CERTAIN fundamental patterns of behavior had by now become second nature to me. No matter what I attempted to do, I could not be satisfied until I gained full control of all the possible facts. In the case of Carlsbad Crystal, this did not mean that I had to learn to blow glass. It did mean that I had to learn its history, had to master a knowledge of its costs and methods of production, as well as existing and potential markets. There was also a tendency to rely more surely on my own imagination. Until now I had found small enough scope for imaginative thinking of any kind in my work, but after the first day in the crystal shop I could feel a new creative power bearing against my mind for release. Imagination would have to help me to improvise the relationships which I must establish with the Carlsbad factories, with my staff, with the products I had undertaken to sell, with people who would eventually buy them. And it would take time, but I was not impatient.

There were many bitter moments to face during those first weeks in the shop. Former acquaintances from my social life in Prague who had known me as the big shot of the night clubs, industrial and diplomatic figures whom I had met as secretary of the bank and later as Wiesner’s son-in-law, came to look around. They would point with scant interest to the first small object their eyes fell upon, as an excuse for their presence, and then ask why I was working in such a place. Couldn’t I find anything better to do?

It was difficult not to turn on my heel and leave them to Beranová, but I made up my mind to go through with it. I decided to handle these men, the hardest customers I would ever have to face, by regulating their behavior through my own actions. I refused to pretend this was a temporary position. I let them know I liked what I was doing and gave not a damn for their opinion. At first they were astonished, and then they were puzzled. What a strange way for a man who had lost face to behave in Prague. They talked about the phenomenon to their friends and after awhile the friends came in to see for themselves. Our cash records showed only a small increase as a result, but it kept the shop door opening and closing rather frequently for awhile.

Almost at once I moved the stock room to the ground floor at the rear of the building, where Novotný could work in better conditions. I had asked permission of the managing board in the factory to make this change and had been refused, so I went ahead on my own, confident that a future increase in business would make them forgive the small added expense.

During the process of this move I happened to discover some sample glasses that were unlike anything in the showroom. They were not in full sets, only odd pieces, such as a water tumbler and a finger bowl in one style, a champagne glass in another, a sherry in another. All were decorated with coats of arms, and Beranová told me they were samples of orders the factory had made through the past seventy years for royal dignitaries. One was rimmed heavily in gold and carried the letters E VII in enamel on the side. On another were two capital A’s interlocked and surmounted by a crown. These had been ordered by Edward the Seventh of Great Britain and Queen Alexandra. There were pure baroque wineglasses with the coat-of-arms of His Holiness Pope Pius XI, and others with the inscription of King Haakon of Norway and King Alfonso of Spain.

For years these samples had been gathering dust in the stock room. We pulled them out and after they were washed and polished they made a noble array. Beranová watched with interest. She had a nice bend to her mind and her taste was innate. Whenever I made a suggestion for change, she considered it carefully and then gave me her opinion, without apology when it differed from my own. But her remarks were never personal. I found myself wanting to tell her about the beautiful glasses my mother had always treasured, and how I had broken one of them when I was a small boy, but it was impossible to do so. Whenever our conversation seemed likely to reach beyond our work, she shyly withdrew.

We put the royal glasses on a shelf by themselves in the most attractive spot in the showroom, careful to see that the lights hit them in such a way as to heighten their engraved or enameled insignia. Pleased with the effect, Beranová saw to it that the glasses on the surrounding shelves formed a background of modernism for our exhibit. And then I undertook to have small cards embossed with the title of each owner, which we placed before the samples for identification. Almost at once this shelf became the center of attention for every newcomer in the shop.

Americans were particularly impressed. Nearly all of them tried to buy one of the samples. Though they were not for sale at any price, I found that on the strength of the impression they made I could now suggest to customers what they ought to buy, and have them agree because we had already sold to royalty.

Those few glasses turned our small shop into a kind of museum. It became a show place with historical connections, and that fact changed ordinary merchandise into wares of value. Instead of our customers looking for useful objects, they now realized they were obtaining a value in our crystal ware that could not be expressed in figures. Instead of our goods being on the level of a sales table, they were put upon a pedestal of culture.

The elderly man who had brought the four Americans on my first day was one of the best guides in the city. During the war he had been a steward on an Austrian pleasure cruiser which had been interned at Southampton, so his English was good. When he came to see me the next day we talked a long time about his work, and because I treated him as a man of experience, he brought us every foreigner who went through his hands from then on. In time it was the same with all the other guides in the city.

As I have said, I spent each night until the early hours of the morning at my desk in the rear of the shop, reorganizing the internal affairs of the business of this branch. The more we sold during the day, the more paper work there was to complete at night. If I could spend years in night clubs to further my career in the bank, as well as feed my taste for gaiety, I reasoned that I could work through the nights in this little room for an even better purpose. Yet I never once found those months a hardship. Crystal had become my hobby as well as my job, and I was absorbed in it to the exclusion of everything else.

I wrote letters to customers, worked on price quotations for future orders, and wrote instructions to the factory. I found myself telling the Meyer brothers and Bělský how their business in Prague should be handled. They allowed me to have my way because the turnover of orders was increasing so fast they could do nothing else but agree with me. The arrogant and offensive criticism which my predecessor had received daily from the factory, judging by the file of correspondence in the back room, was missing now.

For the purpose of learning something about the technique of glass blowing and some of the intricacies of the glass industry, I read everything I could find on the subject. The love of beauty which I had inherited from Mother, and my continuing sense of rhythm, found full expression in the glass which I not only handled, but thought of now as a potential outlet for my longing to create. At night I kept dreaming about myself as a boy, swimming in the Vltava, parting the water with my extended hands. Then I realized why: the motion of swimming and the flaring shape of a fine crystal vase were not dissimilar. In my subconscious mind they were apparently the same.

One passage in a book I found made a profound impression as I read it. Maurice Marinot, a renowned French glass designer, wrote:

An understanding of the effects of weight dominates the whole process of glass-making. Glass can only be blown when a heightened temperature has made it very malleable. The weight of the ductile mass at the end of the blowpipe tends to make it continually lengthen and hang downwards, and it is only by constantly rotating the tube that balance is maintained and the shape preserved. The glass-maker’s tube is not only an implement for blowing. It is a kind of lathe, movable in space, on which the vessel is turned and shaped by contact with the tool applied to it. A constant, instinctive judgment of the degree of heat in the glass is necessary, so that the worker may adapt the scope and speed of his movements to the ductility of the glass. The working of glass, therefore, consists in blowing it while rotating; in forming it while it is alive with the life given it by the fire. And all this must be done with decision and flexible judgment in a very short space of time, and with no possibility of rectifying mistakes.

(From Modern Glass, by Guillaume.)

That was equally applicable to the making of glass or the making of a life’s work. Again when Marinot said: “I consider that a fine piece of glass is that bearing the plainest evidence of the blowing which formed it, and that its shape should represent a moment in the life of the glass which has become fixed in the instant of cooling,” I knew what he meant; glass was much more than a series of articles of use, or the means of fulfilling a snobbish desire for possession. It was the evidence of a philosophy; it was beauty and meaning fused.

At the end of my first ten months in the shop I was able to report an increase of nearly three hundred per cent over the sales of the preceding year, in spite of a falling level of prosperity everywhere. In those ten months I had also gone to Paris to advise the elder Meyer brother on methods of making his own shop more attractive, and I had spent considerable time in Vienna and Berlin investigating opportunities for opening branches in those cities.

During these months Milada Beranová gained confidence in herself. I had only to tell her casually one day how Frenchwomen dressed almost exclusively in black to heighten the tones of their natural color and at the same time to give them dignity, to see her appear a few days later in a new, and highly becoming black dress which she had made herself. It turned the pale primrose hair into a halo for her gray-blue eyes and straight sculptured features. The casual young girl who had smiled at me the first day I entered the shop was now a young woman of distinction.

Paula had disappeared some time before by mutual agreement, like a snowbank on a sunny day. It was a relief to have no more of her nailing arms and impertinent manners. But Beranová needed help, and I knew the kind of girl I wanted in the shop to work with her. Above everything else she must be beautiful. I had become convinced that articles of exquisite beauty should never be handled by plain saleswomen. It was unfair to the women as well as to the merchandise. In our shop we had consciously created an atmosphere which enhanced the beauty of our products. The glass was everything. Its bare spaces and clear, decided designs that related logically to form demanded a proper setting. Lorentz Meyer had proved again and again his comprehension of the possibilities of his materials. It was up to me to keep jarring notes out of the shop.

I came across her by chance, working behind a counter in one of Prague’s department stores, and I knew her at once. I watched her manner of handling customers and then I spoke to her in German. In the guise of a customer who desired information about the articles she was selling, I spoke to her again in French, and she replied in both languages with scarcely the trace of an accent. Later it developed that she spoke English as well. Added to all her accomplishments, she was the most beautiful girl I have ever seen anywhere.

Božena Krásná was her name. Her features were as placid and even in their composition as those of a Hollywood star; her skin was the texture of satin, her hair the color of the midday sun. When I talked to her at length and offered her a sales position in our shop, I found that she had been on the point of running away from Prague because she was depressed by the automatic nature of her work. Krásná was born for happiness and joy, not only to accept but to give with open arms, in full measure.

When she joined our staff the atmosphere of the shop lacked nothing. Beranová gave it distinguished charm and Krásná brought to it scintillating vitality. Even Novotný became clean-shaven and better dressed, for no one enjoyed these changes more than he did. One would have thought it was all his own private success.

Now Karel Berounský fell into the habit of dropping in to see us. Before long he took up headquarters on the chair beside my desk each afternoon when the bank had closed. At first he mocked me, reminding me of the disbelief I had expressed in my own abilities less than a year before. But the beauty of the crystal began to absorb him, too, and before long he was delving into all the variety of interests I had accumulated in this work. After the dry monotone of life in the bank, our small shop excited him, insofar as Karel was able to be enthusiastic about anything without cutting his pleasure through with the knife of his cynicism.

For a time it was our show windows on the street that captured his attention. He conceived fantastic ideas for their dressing, and left me to carry out the technical details. Lorentz Meyer had invented three new colors in crystal which had become renowned in the trade because of the distinct change they underwent from daylight to artificial illumination. Karel decided we should make their quality visible to passers-by. So I rigged up a window which enabled me to throw an artificial spot of light on a vase made of one of these new crystals, showing it to be a deep rose-mauve. Then I placed another object made of the same kind of crystal so that it took the full daylight, and that one was the blue of periwinkles.

Whether it was this particular window display or another that was first mentioned in a trade publication, I don’t remember now. Sometime during that autumn an article on window dressing appeared in the Gazet van Antwerpen, citing a display in the Příkopy branch of the Carlsbad Crystal Factories as the most artistic show window the writer had seen on a trip through Europe. Later similar articles appeared in Marketing and Design in London, several times in a Bulgarian paper, and again in a Swedish magazine in Stockholm.

No attempt had been made to meet the taste of a local clientele in these displays. I purposely arranged my showcases, not for the attraction of ordinary passers-by in Prague but rather in the hope of appealing to individuals with taste. In doing so I managed to reach out directly to the diplomatic corps in Prague.

As soon as the resident foreigners began to patronize our crystal, Prague society took notice. They would never have been attracted by the beauty of our show windows alone because lovely glass is a commonplace in our country, but as soon as they realized that our shop had become a rendezvous of diplomats and wealthy visitors, they decided ours was as good a place as any other in which to buy their glass.

The once sleepy shop was now an overcrowded salesroom where customers arrived as though they were making an official visit. No one pressed them for a sale. They greeted each other, admired Milada and Božena discreetly, talked to me about their world, and were seen by each other. They also bought crystal, which was an added satisfaction.