AFTER the funeral, where I saw my uncle for the last time, I disposed of the apartment in Smichov and gave away all the furnishings it contained. My love for Mother had no need of chairs and tables to keep it intact. I packed my personal belongings and sent them to Carlsbad, and then just before I was ready to walk out of the place for good I returned to Mother’s room. In spite of all the other forces which have played upon me, I am a European, with perhaps more sentiment and even mysticism in my nature than men of the new world. I couldn’t avoid picking up a few things which she had treasured, to keep as symbols of our life together. There was a watch that had belonged to Grandfather; an alarm clock that had never ceased to keep time since before I was born; some old pictures, some flowers Mother had pressed with care, and a notebook filled with her poems.

Then I went back to Carlsbad. It was hot and the spa was in full, overripe bloom. Two days after my return Rudolf Meyer informed me that I had been selected to go to London in September to open a new branch of the factory on Regent Street.

Any change in my surroundings seemed welcome just then, so I agreed to go. The contract which I signed stipulated that two salesgirls from our firm should go to England with me for three months to teach a staff of English girls how to sell our goods. For my part, I could stay permanently in England as manager of the branch there, or I could return to Carlsbad at my own convenience.

I suggested that the two girls from the Prague branch be allowed to go to London, but Rudolf Meyer vetoed Beranová because she could speak no English. Krásná he said would be all right and I might take her if I chose.

That night I called Milada. I said, “How would you like to go to London for three months? I’m leaving to take over the new branch there in September.”

She had never crossed the frontiers of Czechoslovakia except for a short excursion to Switzerland as a child. I could hear the catch in her breath. “Excuse me . . . what did you say?” came her voice at last.

I repeated my question, and this time she laughed when she heard it, as though I had said something very amusing.

“It would only be for three months,” I said. “My contract says I may take you and Božena if you both speak English. You’d have to teach English girls how to sell the glass.”

“Oh . . .” I could almost see her smile fade at the other end of the line. “That’s very nice for Božena. I’m glad she can go. But you know I don’t speak English.”

“Yes,” I said. “I know. Here in Carlsbad they say you couldn’t even learn.”

There was only a split moment of silence. Then her voice came back sure and sweet. “I will know English by September,” she said. “Please don’t engage anyone else. I’ll be ready to go with you and Božena by then.”

I had grave doubts about her ability to accomplish such a feat, but I couldn’t discourage her. At least it would give her a few months of study and a new interest, and that could do her no harm.

Toward the end of August Rudolf Meyer went to Prague on one of his regular inspections. In his presence Milada waited on a group of Americans entirely in English, with an adequate vocabulary and a good Berlitz accent, and she completed her exhibition with a sizable sale. When the Americans had gone, he engaged her for the London trip on the spot.

A few weeks later Milada Beranová, Božena Krásná and I reached London and presented ourselves at the Regent Street shop. Rudolf Meyer was there ahead of us, full of his own plans. Both of these two beautiful Czech girls attracted the attention of everyone who met them, but they did nothing to encourage the advances made on all sides. They found a small apartment for themselves in Kensington and turned their attention to the wearisome business of getting the new shop in running order.

There is little point in laboring the details of those three months in London. This London branch of Carlsbad Crystal was attached to a large English glass and china shop. The staff of English salesgirls made no impression on us. They represented the average type of London clerk. They were negligent in their personal appearance, and as we learned in the dressing room at the rear of the shop, not to be compared from a sanitary point of view with the cultural minimum of our Czech people in the same social position.

It was the year of the Buy British campaign. When Milada and Božena heard the girls in our shop advising English customers not to buy the glass they were supposed to be selling because it wasn’t made in Britain, they decided their usefulness in London was at an end.

British impassivity (we called it British in those days, being unable to distinguish between Welsh, Scotch, English and Irish) made all of us feel uncomfortable. It was so impressive I was almost ready to believe the English were inevitably right. Eventually I discovered that their silence usually hid nothing more than ignorance. But then, sometimes it hid tremendous knowledge and even compassion. The trouble was, you could never be sure. I have come to know England much better now, but I must still insist after careful consideration that London is the only city I have ever lived in which made me feel an inconsequential alien, and what was worse, that I had no right to complain about it.

One month after Božena and Milada went back to Prague, I followed them. I reported to Antonín Hardt, telling him that I considered my mission in London finished, since the shop was in perfect working order and the English partners were prepared to replace me there. Now I awaited his further orders. His reply showed me that he already knew about the internal affairs of the London branch. He went on to tell me what had been happening to Carlsbad Crystal during my absence.

Against the better judgment of the rest of the managing board, Bělský and Rudolf Meyer had pushed through a proposition to open an enormous shop on a dead side street in Prague to handle a cheaper line of glass because they felt the demand for luxury goods had disappeared in the depression. My old branch on Příkopy had been losing heavily.

As I listened I felt torn with a sharp pain. Something beautiful was being smashed into small pieces, something I had nurtured and loved. For all his impressive façade of careful calculation, Hardt seemed to know how I felt. He went on to tell me that Gründlich and Fischer of the Bohemian Ceramic Works had expressed their readiness to join this new branch on Revoluční třída with their own goods, as partners in the enterprise, on the stipulation that I take over its management.

It was a while before I said anything. Then: “You know the position in which you place me?”

“Perhaps. What is in your mind?”

“You are putting me on a spot where everyone in Prague can watch me break my own neck. I haven’t the least interest in a cheap line of glass or china. It means that my old branch on Příkopy will be my competitor. A shop on Revoluční třída will be a dead end, leading nowhere.”

Then he said something which I was never able to forget. “A street doesn’t make a shop, but a shop can make a street.”

It was a spur, as he doubtless knew it would be. I had no alternative. “You called me from Paris,” I said, “and I don’t think you’ve regretted it. Now I’ll show you that a shop can make a street.”

So I went down to look over the place on Revoluční třída. It was too large, too bare, too unfriendly. Hardt had led me to believe that I was still senior to Jiří Mašek and could have the two girls from Příkopy if I wanted them. But Mašek thought otherwise. In the eyes of all the employees in the factory at Carlsbad, as well as those in the branches, my appointment as manager of this shop which would handle a lower grade of goods was a setback. When I asked Božena and Milada if they wanted to transfer to my new shop, Božena refused without a second’s thought. With a smile of apology she tried to explain that she felt she was better fitted to sell luxury goods.

Two of my old staff requested their transfer to Revoluční třída. Novotný and Beranová helped me put it in order, and though Novotný cursed day after day about the entire project, there was between the three of us a feeling of comradeship. Together we had built something, and together we could do it again. While Novotný made extra shelves and got the stock in order for an advertised opening, Milada and I went to the Bohemian Ceramic Works to study the details of china manufacturing.

The factory was a large building, sitting squarely beside a reservoir in a wide valley of northern Bohemia near the German border some miles beyond Carlsbad. The extensive buildings were white and very clean, in command of all the landscape roundabout, and tremendously busy. Rosenthal, the famous German ceramic master, had built this factory in 1922 here in a Bohemian valley for the purpose of entering not only the Czechoslovak market itself, but also the extensive export market open to Czechoslovakian goods. His scheme failed and in a short time he sold out to the Associated Bank, in conjunction with another private banking house. The factory was still manned entirely by Reich Germans from Saxony and Bavaria.

Whereas I had been told nothing and shown nothing at the Carlsbad Crystal Factories, we were now subjected to an appalling efficiency in pouring facts into our heads. We might have been mental defectives, so minute and elementary was the instruction. For two weeks we let them give us piecemeal the secrets of china manufacturing and promotion, listening quietly and hiding the disdain we felt for their inability to realize that we both had sufficient sales experience as well as imagination to enable us to do without their long exhortations.

It was during these two weeks, when we were left to our own devices at the end of the day, that I came to know a little more about Milada’s life before we had met. She was born, and had always lived in Zižkov, a suburb of Prague. It was a district inhabited chiefly by workers and small tradespeople who were strong Czech nationalists, even in the days of the empire. Her father had been a wood carver and he had died when she was quite small. After his death her mother, left with four children, had gone through a fight to keep them, even as my own mother had struggled for the sake of her one child.

These facts came out little by little, for Milada was never inclined to speak of herself unless I pressed her. Winter lay over the valley during our two weeks at the china works, so we had little to do but sit before the fire at the inn and talk.

As long as she could remember, she had been the weakest of the four children. When the International Red Cross came to Prague in 1918 to select the neediest children of the half-starved former empire for care, she was sent by this organization to Switzerland to recuperate and learn what fruits and milk and butter and eggs tasted like, and how they could turn small, emaciated bodies into healthy, happy children.

Milada was one of the most tranquil and deeply happy persons I have ever known. She seemed to have an inner spring of confidence and poise that welled up to succor others whenever they became parched with disappointment and worry. Probably at no time would the ten years’ difference in our ages have seemed so great as the time when she went to Switzerland. I was in uniform in Salonika in those days. Had I encountered her then she would have seemed a funny, skinny little girl with yellow pigtails and hollow cheeks. Now she was very beautiful. Her cheekbones were prominent still, but they gave her sleek features the look of a highly-bred international beauty. Even the way she sat easily and gracefully in a chair, with the fire throwing dancing lights into her cornflower eyes, bespoke the self-possession so natural in a Czech girl of her background.

When her schooling was over she became an apprentice in a needlework shop. Then she was offered an opportunity to work in the Příkopy branch of Carlsbad Crystal. After that she had no wish to do anything else. She had been a member of the Sokol, and a love of Czech independence had been strongly embedded in her mind from childhood. I knew that many men admired her. I also knew that she had been given ample opportunities both in London and in Prague to work at higher wages in larger establishments. Yet there was no trace of bargaining in her manner and no hint of coquetry. She was unlike any other woman I had ever known.

During the hours of our work her manner toward me was strictly formal and impersonal. Yet there was no doubt about the degree of our dependence upon each other. She made no overtures, but she responded simply and naturally to my interest and the evidences of my deep attachment. Asking nothing for herself, giving generously of her warm nature to anyone in need, she was yet too independent to fall permanently into anyone else’s shadow. No one made the mistake twice of trying to take advantage of her. So she was at once simple and complex, beautiful enough to demand a man’s soul with an expectation of getting it, and yet ready to give encouragement and affection with never a thought of reward.

Those two weeks out of time at the Bohemian Ceramic Works were a strange interim for me. We watched the clay go into great mixing vats, we watched the fires burn hot under it; we saw the stuff mixed and stirred and shaken and poured and pressed, all by machinery. We learned how it was molded and shaped by hand, and then how it was baked, glazed, painted and heated again, and finally inspected and packed. Sometimes I caught Milada’s eye when one of the managers tried to tell us what fine plates these were, or what extraordinary cups those were, and how we must push this or that pattern. Most of it looked dull and commonplace, and some of the patterns were downright ugly. But our opinions were not requested and would have been unwelcome had they been offered. The great vats of cream-colored mud continued to be mixed and poured and molded and baked.

And all the time I was falling in love. Because it was unlike anything I had called love before, I failed to recognize what was happening to me. I simply thought I was extraordinarily happy. If Milada knew how I felt, she gave no sign.

Toni and I had been divorced some time before and she had married again. Once or twice I had seen her in a crowd in Prague, but her embarrassment over these encounters was obvious, so we had avoided conversation. The idea of marrying again had never crossed my own mind. When I thought about my three years with Toni, it was only to conclude that marriage was a state of affairs for which I was unfit. Karel Berounský had infected me with some of his sharpest cynicism on the subject. Milada would certainly marry some day, but until I was faced with the fact, I refused to think about it. I did make the mental reservation that the man of her choice had better be one who could take good care of her. No man had any right to marry unless he had everything in the world to offer a woman, and nothing to gain from such a partnership. I held a firm conviction on that point.

On the last day before our scheduled return to Prague, Milada and I were in Gründlich’s office. While he talked with her in pedantic polysyllables about matters which she already knew by heart, I wandered across the room to a case full of china. In a corner of the top shelf I found one plate and a single bouillon cup which attracted my attention. I picked them up and studied their lovely shape, their ivory glaze and the fine platinum ribbon which was their only ornament. There was nothing of the gutes deutsches Geschirr in these pieces. They were the only ones I had seen in the factory on which the mark of uniform German taste was missing. Here at last was something of real beauty.

I carried them across the room and placed them on the desk before Milada. She said nothing, but from the slight movement about the corners of her mouth I knew she agreed with me. Gründlich watched us with puzzled interest. I asked him if this pattern would be included in our stock. He replied that the samples were troublesome and objectionable.

“But why?” I said. “They are very fine and they should sell well.”

“No,” he persisted. “They were suggested by an American representative who thought his countrymen would like them. Americans are strange, you know. We don’t make them up for Europeans. They are too übertrieben . . . too extravagant.

“I agree with you, Herr Gründlich. But I should nevertheless like to have them for the Prague showroom.”

He began to protest with gestures. He gave me a lecture on salesmanship. When he had finished I informed him that I considered it advisable for the man who sold the goods to decide what he must have, not someone sitting in an office in a factory. He gathered without my putting the thought into words that I was tired of accepting his German domination. Compromise had gone far enough.

“Of course,” he said. “If you insist . . .”

Whether or not I had those samples seemed a small matter at the time. I had persisted for the reason that I admired them, as well as to show Gründlich that I could not be bullied. It was the first showdown between his superiority complex and my own conviction of strength based upon past experience. From then on, I received fewer lectures at his hands.