雙語·國際象棋的故事

THE big liner, due to sail from New York to Buenos Aires at midnight, was filled with the activity and bustle incident to the last hour. Visitors who had come to see their friends off pressed hither and thither, page-boys with caps smartly cocked slithered through the public rooms shouting names snappily, baggage, parcels and flowers were being hauled about, inquisitive children ran up and down companion-ways, while the deck orchestra provided persistent accompaniment. I stood talking to an acquaintance on the promenade deck, somewhat apart from the hubbub, when two or three flash-lights sprayed sharply near us, evidently for press photos of some prominent passenger at a lastminute interview. My friend looked in that direction and smiled.

“You have a queer bird on board, that Czentovic.”

And as my face must have revealed that the statement meant nothing to me he added, by way of explanation, “Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion. He has just finished off the U.S.A. in a coast-tocoast exhibition tour and is on his way to capture Argentina.”

This served to recall not only the name of the young world champion but also a few details relating to his rocket-like career; my friend a more observant newspaper reader than I, was able to eke them out with a string of anecdotes. At a single stroke, about a year ago, Czentovic had aligned himself with the solidest Elder Statesmen of the art of chess, such as Alekhin, Capa-blanca, Tartakover, Lasker, Boguljobov; not since the appearance of the nine-year-old prodigy, Reshevsky, in New York in 1922, had a newcomer crashed int the famed guild to the accompaniment of such widespread interest. It seems that Czentovic’s intellectual equipment, at the beginning, gave small promise of so brilliant a career. The secret soon seeped through that in his private capacity this champion wasn’t able to write a single sentence in any language without misspelling a word, and that, as one of his vexed colleagues, wrathfully sarcastic, put it, “He enjoys equal ignorance in every field of culture.” His father, a poverty-stricken Yugoslavian boatman on the Danube, had been run down in his tiny vessel one night by a grain steamer, and the orphaned boy, then twelve, was taken in charge by the pastor of their obscure village out of pity. The good man did his level best to instill into the indolent, slowspeaking, low-browed child at home what he seemed unable to grasp in the village school.

But all efforts proved vain. Mirko stared blankly at the writing exercise just as if the strokes had not already been explained a hundred times; his lumbering brain lacked every power to grasp even the simplest subjects. At fourteen he still counted with his fingers, and it was only by dint of great strain that he could read in a book or newspaper. Yet none could say that Mirko was unwilling or disobedient. Whatever he was told to do he did: fetched water, split wood, worked in the field, washed up the kitchen, and he could be relied upon to execute—even if with exasperating slowness—every service that was demanded. But what grieved the kindly pastor most about the blockhead was his total lack of co-operation. He performed no deed unless specially directed, asked no questions, never played with other lads, and sought no occupation of his own accord; after Mirko had concluded his work about the house, he would sit idly with that empty stare one sees with grazing sheep, without participating in the slightest in what might be going on. Of an evening, while the pastor sucked at his long peasant pipe and played his customary three games of chess with the policesergeant, the fair-haired dull-wit squatted silent alongside them, staring from under his heavy lids, seemingly sleepy and indifferent, at the checkered board.

One winter evening, while the two men were absorbed in their daily game, a rapid crescendo of bells gave notice of a quickly approaching sleigh. A peasant, his cap covered with snow, stamped in hastily to tell the pastor that his mother lay dying and to ask his immediate attendance in the hope that there was still time to administer extreme unction. The priest accompanied him at once. The police-sergeant, who had not yet finished his beer, lighted a fresh pipe preparatory to leaving, and was about to draw on his heavy sheepskin boots when he noticed how immovably Mirko’s gaze was fastened on the board with its interrupted game.

“Well, do you want to finish it?” he said jocularly, fully convinced that the sleepyhead had no notion of how to move a single piece. The boy looked up shyly, nodded assent, and took the pastor’s place. After fourteen moves the sergeant was beaten and he had to concede that his defeat was in no wise attributable to avoidable carelessness. The second game resulted similarly.

“Balaam’s ass!” cried the astounded pastor upon his return, explaining to the policeman, a lesser expert in the Bible, that two thousand years ago there had been a like miracle of a dumb being suddenly endowed with the speech of wisdom. The late hour notwithstanding, the good man could not forgo challenging his half-illiterate helper to a contest. Mirko beat him too, with ease. He played toughly, slowly, deliberately, never once raising bowed broad brow from the board. But he played with irrefutable certainty, and in the days that followed neither the priest nor the policeman was able to win a single game.

The priest, best able to assess his ward’s various short comings, now became curious as to the manner in which this one-sided singular gift would resist a severer test. After Mirko had been made somewhat presentable by the efforts of the village barber, he drove him in his sleigh to the near-by town where he knew that many chess-players—a cut above him in ability, he was aware from experience—were always to be found in the cafe on the main square. The pastor’s entrance, as he steered the straw-haired, red-cheeked fifteen-year-old before him, created no small stir in the circle; the boy, in his sheepskin jacket (woollen side in) and high boots, eyes shyly downcast, stood aside until summoned to a chess-table.

Mirko lost the first encounter because his master had never employed the Sicilian defence. The next game, with the best player of the lot, resulted in a draw. But in the third game and the fourth and all that came after he slew them, one after the other.

It so happens that little provincial towns of Yugoslavia are seldom the theatre of exciting events; consequently, this first appearance of the peasant champion before the assembled worthies became no less than a sensation. It was unanimously decided to keep the boy in town until the next day for a special gathering of the chess club and, in particular, for the benefit of Count Simczic of the castle, a chess fanatic. The priest, who now regarded his ward with quite a new pride, but whose joy of discovery was subordinate to the sense of duty which called him home to his Sunday service, consented to leave him for further tests. The chess group put young Czentovic up at the local hotel, where he saw a water-closet for the first time in his life. The chess-room was crowded to capacity on Sunday afternoon. Mirko faced the board immobile for fours, spoke no word, and never looked up; one player after another fell before him. Finally a multiple game after was proposed; it took a while before they could make clear to the novice that he had to play against several contestants at one and the same time. No sooner had Mirko grasped the procedure than he adapted himself to it, and trod slowly with heavy, creaking shoes from table to table, eventually winning seven of the eight games.

Grave consultations now took place. True, strictly speaking, the new champion was not of the town, yet the innate national pride had received a fillip. Here was a chance, at last, for this town, so small that its existence was hardly suspected, to put itself on the map by sending a great man into the world. A vaudeville agent named Koller who supplied the local garrison cabaret with talent, offered to obtain professional training for the youth from a Viennese expert whom he knew, and to see him through for a year if the deficit were, made good. Count Simczic who in his sixty years of daily chess had never encountered so remarkable an antagonist, signed the guarantee promptly. That day marked the opening of the astonishing career of the Danube boatman’s son.

It took only six months for Mirko to master every secret of chess technique, though with one odd limitation which later became apparent to the votaries of the game and caused many a sneer. He never was able to memorize a single game, or, to use the professional term, to play blind. He lacked completely the ability to conceive the board in the limitless space of the imagination. He had to have the field of sixtyfour black and white squares and the thirty-two pieces tangibly before him; even when he had attained international fame he carried a folding pocket board with him in order to be able to reconstruct a game or work on a problem by visual means. This deficit, in itself not important, betrayed a want of imaginative power and provoked animated discussions among chess enthusiasts similar to those in musical circles when it discovers that an outstanding virtuoso or conductor is unable to play or direct without a score. This singularity, however, was no obstacle to Mirko’s stupendous rise, At seventeen he already possessed a dozen prizes, at eighteen he won the Hungarian mastery, and finally, at twenty, the championship of the world. The boldest experts, everyone of them immeasurably his superior in brains, imagination, and audacity, fell before his tough, cold logic as did Napoleon before the clumsy Kutusov and Hannibal before Fabius Cunctator, of whom Livy records that his traits of phlegm and imbecility were already conspicuous in his childhood. Thus it occurred that the illustrious gallery of chess masters, which included eminent representatives of widely varied intellectual fields—philosophers, mathematicians, constructive, imaginative, and often creative talents—was invaded by a complete outsider, a heavy, taciturn peasant from whom not even the cunningest journalists were ever able to extract a word that would help to make a story. Yet, however he may have deprived the newspapers of polished phrases, substitutes in the way of anecdotes about his person were numerous, for, inescapably, the moment he arose from the board at which he was the incomparable master, Czentovic became a grotesque, an almost comic figure. In spite of his correct dress, his fashionable cravat with its too ostentatious pearl tie-pin, and his carefully manicured nails, he remained in manners and behaviour the narrow-minded lout who was accustomed to sweeping out the priest’s kitchen. He utilized his gift and his fame to squeeze out all the money they would yield, displaying petty and often vulgar greed, always with a shameless clumsiness that aroused his professional colleagues’ ridicule and anger. He travelled from town to town, stopped at the cheapest hotels, played for any club that would pay his fee, sold the advertising rights in his portrait to a soap manufacturer,and oblivious of his competitors’ scorn—they being aware that he hardly knew how to write-attached his name to a Philosophy of Chess that had been written by a hungry Galician student for a businessminded publisher. As with all leathery dispositions, he was wanting in any appreciation of the ludicrous; from the time he became champion he regarded himself as the most important man in the world, and the consciousness of having beaten all those clever, intellectual, brilliant speakers and writers in their own field and of earning more than they, transformed his early unsureness into a cold and awkwardly flaunted pride.

“And how can one expect that such rapid fame should fail to befuddle so empty a head?” concluded my friend who had just advanced those classic examples of Czentovic’s childish lust for rank.“Why shouldn’t a twenty-one-year-old lad from the Banat be afflicted with a frenzy of vanity if, suddenly, by merely shoving figures around on a wooden board, he can earn more in a week than his whole village does in a year by chopping down trees under the bitterest conditions? Besides, isn’t it damned easy to take yourself for a great man if you’re not burdened with the slightest suspicion that a Rembrandt, a Beethoven, a Dante, a Napoleon, ever even existed? There’s just one thing in that immured brain of his—the knowledge that he hasn’t lost a game of chess for months, and as he happens not to dream that the world holds other values than chess and money, he has every reason to be infatuated with himself.”

The information communicated by my friend could not fail to excite my special curiosity. I have always been fascinated by all types of monomania, by persons wrapped up in a single idea; for the stricter the limits a man sets for himself, the more clearly he approaches the eternal. Just such seemingly world-aloof persons create their own remarkable and quite unique world-in-little, and work, termite like, in their particular medium. Thus I made no bones about my intention to examine this specimen of one-track intellect under a magnifying glass during the twelve-day journey to Rio.

“You’ll be out of luck,” my friend warned me. “So far as I know, nobody has succeeded in extracting the least bit of psychological material from Czentovic. Underneath all his abyssmal limitations this sly farm-hand conceals the wisdom not to expose himself. The procedure is simple: except with such compatriots of his own sphere as he contrives to meet in ordinary taverns he avoids all conversation. When he senses a person of culture he retreats into his shell; that’s why nobody can plume himself on having heard him say something stupid or on having sounded the presumably bottomless depths of his ignorance.”

As a matter of fact, my friend was right. It proved utterly impossible to approach Czentovic during the first few days of the voyage, unless by intruding rudely, which, of course, isn’t my way. He did, sometimes, appear on the promenade deck, but then always with hands clasped behind his back in a posture of dignified self-absorption, like Napoleon in the familiar painting; and, at that, those peripatetic exhibitions were carried off in such haste and so jerkily that to gain one’s end one would have had to trot after him. The lounges, the bar, the smoking-room, saw nothing of him. A steward of whom I made confidential inquiries revealed that he spent the greater part of the day in his cabin with a large chess-board on which he recapitulated games or worked out new problems.

After three days it angered me to think that his defence tactics were more effective than my will to approach him. I had never before had a chance to know a great chess-player personally, and the more I now sought to familiarize myself with the type, the more incomprehensible seemed a lifelong brain activity that rotated exclusively about a space composed of sixty-four black and white squares. I was well aware from my own experience of the mysterious attraction of the royal game, which among all games contrived by man rises superior to the tyranny of chance and bestows its palm only on mental attainment, or rather on a definite form of mental endowment. But is it not an offensively narrow construction to call chess a game? Is it not a science, a technique, an art, that sways among these categories as Mahomet’s coffin does between heaven and earth, at once a union of all contradictory concepts: primeval yet ever new; mechanical in operation yet effective only through the imagination; bounded in geometric space though boundless in its combinations; ever-developing yet sterile; thought that leads to nothing;mathematics that produce no result; art without works; architecture without substance, and nevertheless, as proved by evidence, more lasting in its being and presence than all books and achievements; the only game that belongs to all peoples and all ages; of which none knows the divinity that bestowed it on the world, to slay boredom, to sharpen the senses, to exhilarate the spirit? One searches for its beginning and for its end. Children can learn its simple rules, duffers succumb to its temptation, yet within this immutable tight square it creates a particular species of master not to be compared with any other—persons destined for chess alone, specific geniuses in whom vision, patience, and technique are operative through a distribution no less precisely ordained than in mathematicians, poets, composers, but merely united on a different level. In the heyday of physiognomical research a Gall would perhaps have dissected the brains of such masters of chess to establish whether a particular coil in the grey matter of the brain, a sort of chess muscle or chess bump was more conspicuously developed than in other skulls. How a physiognomist would have been fascinated by the case of a Czentovic where that which is genius appears interstratified with an absolute inertia of the intellect like a single vein of gold in a ton of dead rock! It stands to reason that so unusual a game, one touched with genius, must create out of itself fitting matadors. This I always knew, but what was difficult and almost impossible to conceive of was the life of a mentally alert person whose world contracts to a narrow, black-andwhite one-way street; who seeks ultimate triumphs in the to-and-fro, forward-and-backward movement of thirty-two pieces; a being who, by a new opening in which the knight is preferred to the pawn, apprehends greatness and the immortality that goes with casual mention in a chess handbook-of a man of spirit who, escaping madness, can unremittingly devote all of his mental energy during ten, twenty, thirty, forty years to the ludicrous effort to corner a wooden king on a wooden board!

And here for the first time, one of these phenomena, one of these singular geniuses (or shall I say puzzling fools?) was close to me, six cabins distant, and I, unfortunate, for whom curiosity about mental problems manifested itself in a kind of passion, seemed unable to effect my purpose. I conjured up the absurdest ruses: should I tickle his vanity by the offer of an interview in an important paper, or engage his greed by proposing a lucrative exhibition tour of Scotland? Finally it occurred to me that the hunter’s never-failing practice is to lure the woodcock by imitating its mating cry, so what more; successful way was there of attracting a chess master’s attention to myself than by playing chess?

At no time had I ever permitted chess to absorb me seriously, for the simple reason that it meant nothing to me but a pastime; if I spend an hour at the board it is not because I want to subject myself to a strain but, on the contrary to relieve mental tension. I “Play” at chess in the literal sense of the word, whereas to real devotees it is serious business. Chess, like love, cannot be played alone, and up to that time I had no idea whether there were other chess lovers on board. In order to attract them from their lairs I set a primitive trap in the smoking-room in that my wife (whose game is even weaker than mine) and I sat at a chessboard as a decoy. Sure enough, we had made no more than six moves before one passer-by stopped, another asked permission to watch, and before long the desired partner materialized. MacIver was his name; a Scottish foundation-engineer who, I learned, had made a large fortune boring for oil in California. He was a robust specimen with an almost square jaw and strong teeth, and a rich complexion pronouncedly rubicund as a result, at least in part surely, of copious indulgence in whisky. His conspicuously broad, almost vehemently athletic shoulders made themselves unpleasantly noticeable in his game, for this MacIver typified those self-important worshippers of success who regard defeat in even a harmless contest as a blow to their self-esteem. Accustomed to achieving his ends ruthlessly, and spoiled by material success, this massive self-made man was so thoroughly saturated with his sense of superiority that opposition of any kind became undue resistance if not insult. After losing the first round he sulked and began to explain in detail, and dictatorially, that it would not have happened but for a momentary oversight; in the third he ascribed his failure to the noise in the adjoining room; never would he lose a game without at once demanding revenge. This ambitious crabbedness amused me at first, but as time went on I accepted it as the unavoidable accompaniment to my real purpose—tempt the master to our table.

By the third day it worked—but only half-way. It may be that Czentovic observed us at the chess-board through a window from the promenade deck or that he just happened to be honouring the smokingroom with his presence; anyway, as soon as he perceived us interlopers toying with the tools of his trade, he involuntarily stepped a little nearer and, keeping a deliberate distance, cast a searching glance at our board. It was MacIver’s move. This one move was sufficient to apprise Czentovic how little a further pursuit of our dilettantish striving was worthy of his expert interest. With the same matter-of-course gesture with which one of us disposes of a poor detective story that has been proffered in a library—without even thumbing its pages—he turned away from our table and left the room. “Weighed in the balance and found wanting,” I thought, slightly stung by the cool, contemptuous look, and to give vent to my ill-humour in some fashion, I said to MacIver, “Your move didn’t seem to impress the master.”

“Which master?”

I told him that the man who had just walked by after glancing disapprovingly at our game was Czentovic, international chess champion. I added that we would be able to survive it without taking his contempt too greatly to heart; the poor have to cook with water. But to my astonishment these idle words of mine produced quite an unexpected result. Immediately he became excited, forgot our game, and his ambition took to an almost audible throbbing. He had no notion that Czentovic was on board: Czentovic simply had to give him a game;the only time he had ever played with a champion was in a multiple game when he was one of forty, even that was fearfully exciting, and he had come quite near winning. Did I know the champion personally?—I didn’t.—Would I not invite him to join us? I declined on the ground that I was aware of Czentovic's reluctance to make new acquaintances. Besides, what charm would intercourse with third-rate players hold for a champion?

It would have been just as well not to say that about third-rate players to a man of MacIver’s brand of conceit. Annoyed, he leaned back and declared gruffly that, as for himself, he couldn’t believe that Czentovic would decline a gentleman’s courteous challenge; he’d see to that. Upon getting a brief description of the master’s person he stormed out, indifferent to our un-finished game, uncontrollably impatient to intercept Czentovic on the deck. Again I sensed that there was no holding the possessor of such broad shoulders once his will was involved in an undertaking.

I waited, somewhat tensed. Some ten minutes elapsed and MacIver returned, not in too good humour, it seemed to me.

“Well?” I asked.

“You were right,” he answered, a bit annoyed. “Not a very pleasant gentleman. I introduced myself and told him who I am. He didn’t even put out his hand. I tried to make him understand that all of us on board would be proud and honoured if he’d play the lot of us. But he was cursed stiff-necked about it; said he was sorry but his contract obligations to his agent definitely precluded any game during his entire tour except for a fee. And his minimum is $250 per game.”

I had to laugh. The thought would never have come to me that one could make so much money by pushing figures from black squares to white ones. “Well, I, hope you took leave of him with courtesy equal to his.”

MacIver, however, remained perfectly serious. “The match is to come off at three to-morrow afternoon. Here in the smoking room. I hope he won’t make mincemeat of us easily.”

“What! You promised him the $250?” I cried quite taken aback.

“Why not? It’s his business. If I had a toothache and there happened to be a dentist aboard, I wouldn’t, expect him to extract my tooth for nothing. The man’s right to ask a fat price; in every line the big shots are the best traders. So far as I’m concerned, the less complicated the business, the better. I’d rather pay in cash than have your Mr. Czentovic do me a favour and in the end have to say ‘Thank you.’ Anyway, many an evening at the club has cost me more than $250 without giving me a chance to play a world champion. It’s no disgrace for a third-rate player to be beaten by a Czentovic.”

It amused me to note how deeply I had injured MacIver’s self-love with that “Third-rate”. But as he was disposed to foot the bill it was not for me to remark on his wounded ambition which promised at last to afford me an acquaintance with my odd fish. Promptly we notified the four or five others who had revealed themselves as chess-players of the approaching event and reserved not only our own table but the adjacent ones so that we might suffer the least possible disturbance from passengers strolling by.

Next day all our group was assembled at the appointed hour. The centre seat opposite that of the master was allotted to MacIver as a matter of course; his nervousness found outlet in the smoking of strong cigars, one after another, and in restlessly glancing ever and again at the clock. The champion let us wait a good ten minutes—my friend’s tale prompted the surmise that something like this would happen—thus heightening the impressiveness of his entry. He approached the table calmly an imperturbably. He offered no greeting. “You know who I am and I’m not interested in who you are” was what his discourtesy seemed to imply, but he, began in a dry, businesslike way to lay down the conditions. Since there were not enough boards on the ship for separate games he proposed that we should play against him collectively. After each of his moves he would retire to the end of the room so that his presence might not affect our consultations. As soon as our countermove had been made we were to strike a glass with a spoon, no table-bell being available. He proposed, if it pleased us ten minutes as the maximum time for each move. Like timid pupils we accepted every suggestion: un-questioningly. Czentovic drew black at the choice of colours, while still standing he made the first counter-move, then turned at once to go to the designated waiting place where he reclined lazily while carelessly examining an illustrated magazine.

There is little point in reporting the game. It ended, as it could not but end, in our complete defeat, and by the twenty-fourth move at that. There was nothing particularly astonishing about an international champion wiping off half a dozen mediocre or sub-mediocre players with his left hand; what did disgust us, though, was the lordly manner with which Czentovic caused us to feel, all too plainly, that it was with his left hand that, we had been disposed of. Each time he would give a quick, seemingly careless look at the board, and would look indolently past us as if we ourselves were dead wooden figures; and this impertinent proceeding reminded one irresistibly of the way one throws a mangy dog a morsel without taking the trouble to look at him. According to my way of thinking, if he had any sensitivity he might have shown us our mistakes or cheered us up with a friendly word. Even at the conclusion this sub-human chess automaton uttered no syllable, but, after saying “Mate,” stood motionless at the table waiting to ascertain whether another game was desired. I had already risen with the thought of indicating by a gesture—helpless as one always remains in the face of thick-skinned rudeness—that as far as I was concerned the pleasure of our acquaintance was ended now that the dollars-and-cents part of it was over, when, to my anger, MacIver, next to me, spoke up hoarsely: “Revanche!”

The note of challenge startled me; MacIver at this moment seemed much more like a pugilist about to put up his fists than a polite gentleman. Whether it was Czentovic’s disagreeable treatment of us that affected him or merely MacIver’s own pathological irritable ambition, suffice it that the latter had undergone a complete change. Red in the face up to his hair, his nostrils taut from inner pressure, he breathed hard, and a sharp fold separated the bitten lips from his belligerently projected jaw. I recognized with disquiet that flicker of the eyes that connotes uncontrollable passion such as seizes players at roulette when the right colour fails to come after the sixth or seventh successively doubled stake. Instantly I knew that this fanatical climber would, even at the cost of his entire fortune, play against Czentovic and play and play and play, for simple or doubled stakes, until he won at least a single game. If Czentovic stuck to it, MacIver would prove a gold-mine that would yield him a nice few thousands by the time Buenos Aires came in sight.

Czentovic remained unmoved. “If you please,” he responded politely. “You gentlemen will take black this time.”

There was nothing different about the second game except that our group became larger because of a few added onlookers, and livelier, too. MacIver stared fixedly at the board as if he willed to magnetize the chess-men to victory; I sensed that he would have paid a thousand dollars with delight if he could but shout “Mate” at our cold-snouted adversary. Oddly enough, something of his sudden excitement entered unconsciously into all of us. Every single move was discussed with greater emotion than before; always we would wrangle up to the last moment before agreeing to signal Czentovic to return to the table. We had come to the seventeenth move and, to our own surprise, entered on a combination which seemed staggeringly advantageous because we had been enabled to advance a pawn to the last square but one; we needed but to move it forward to c1 to win a second queen. Not that we felt too comfortable about so obvious an opportunity; we were united in suspecting that the advantage which we seemed to have wrested could be no more than bait dangled by Czentovic whose vision enabled him to view the situation from a distance of several moves. Yet in spite of common examination and discussion, we were unable to explain it as a feint. At last, at the limit of our ten minutes, we decided to risk the move. MacIver’s fingers were on the pawn to move it to the last square when he felt his arm gripped and heard a voice, low and impetuous, whisper, “For God’s sake! Don’t!”

Involuntarily we all turned about. I recognized in the man of some forty-five years, who must have joined the group during the last few minutes in which we were absorbed in the problem before us, one whose narrow sharp face had already arrested my attention on deck strolls because of its extraordinary, almost chalky pallor. Conscious of our gaze, he continued rapidly:

“If you make a queen he will immediately attack with the bishop, then you’ll take it with your knight. Meantime, however, he moves his pawn to d7, threatens your rook, and even if you check with the knight you’re lost and will be wiped out in nine or ten moves. It’s practically the constellation that Alekhin introduced when he played Boguljobov in 1922 at the championship tournament at Pistany.”

Astonished, MacIver released the pawn and, like the rest of us, stared amazedly at the man who had descended in our midst like a rescuing angel. Anyone who can reckon a mate nine moves ahead must necessarily be a first-class expert, perhaps even a contestant now on his way to the tournament to seize the championship, so that his sudden presence, his thrust into the game at precisely the critical moment,partook almost of the supernatural.

MacIver was the first to collect himself. “What do you advise?” he asked suppressedly.

“Don’t advance yet; rather a policy of evasion. First of all, get the king out of the danger line from g8 to h7. Then he’ll probably transfer his attack to the other flank. Then you parry that with the rook, c8 to c4; two moves and he will have lost not only a pawn but his superiority, and if you maintain your defensive properly you may be able to make it a draw. That’s the best you can get out of it.”

We gasped, amazed. The precision no less than the rapidity of his calculations dizzied us; it was as if he had been reading the moves from a printed page. For all that, this unsuspected turn by which, thanks to his cutting in, the contest with a world champion promised a draw, worked wonders. Animated by a single thought, we moved aside so as not to obstruct his observation of the board.

Again MacIver inquired: “The king, then; to h7?”

“Surely. The main thing is to duck.”

MacIver obeyed and we rapped on the glass. Czentovic came forward at his habitual even pace, his eyes swept the board and took in the countermove. Then he moved the pawn h2 to h4 on the king’s flank exactly as our unknown aid had predicted. Already the latter was whispering excitedly:

“The rook forward, the rook, to c4; then he’ll first have to cover the pawn. That won’t help him, though. Don’t bother about his pawns but attack with the knight c3 to d5, and the balance is again restored. Press the offensive instead of defending.”

We had no idea of what he meant. He might have been talking Chinese. But once under his spell MacIver did as he had been bidden. Again we struck the glass to recall Czentovic. This was the first time that he made no quick decision; instead he looked fixedly at the board. His eyebrows contracted involuntarily. Then he made his move, the one which our stranger had said he would, and turned to go. Yet before he started off something novel and unexpected happened. Czentovic raised his eyes and surveyed our ranks; plainly he wanted to ascertain who it was that offered such unaccustomed energetic resistance.

From this moment our excitement grew immeasurably. Thus far we had played without genuine hope, but now every pulse beat hotly at the thought of breaking Czentovic's cold disdain. Without loss of time our new friend had directed the next move and we were ready to call Czentovic back. My fingers trembled as I hit the spoon against the glass. And now we registered our first triumph. Czentovic, who hitherto had executed his purpose standing, hesitated, hesitated and finally sat down. He did this slowly and heavily, but that was enough to cancel—in a physical sense if in no other—the difference in levels that had previously obtained. We had necessitated his acknowledgment of equality, spatially at least. He cogitated long, his eyes resting immovably on the board so that one could scarcely discern the pupils under the heavy lids, and under the strained application his mouth opened gradually, which gave him a rather foolish look. Czentovic reflected for some minutes, then made a move and rose. At once our friend said half audibly:

“A stall! Well thought out! But don’t yield to it. Force an exchange, he’s got to exchange, then we’ll get a draw and not even the gods can help him.”

MacIver did as he was told. The succeeding manoeuvres between the two men—we others had long since become mere supernumeraries—consisted of a back-and-forth that we were unable to comprehend. After some seven moves Czentovic looked up after a period of silence and said, “Draw.”

For a moment a total stillness reigned. Suddenly one heard the rushing of the waves and the jazzing radio in the adjacent drawingroom; one picked out every step on the promenade outside and the faint thin susurration of the wind that carried through the windowframes. None of us breathed; it had come upon us too abruptly and we were nothing less than frightened in the face of the impossible: that this stranger should have been able to force his will on the world champion in a contest already half lost. MacIver shoved himself back and relaxed, and his suppressed breathing became audible in the joyous “Ah” that passed his lips. I took another look at Czentovic. It had already seemed to me during the later moves that he grew paler. But he understood how to maintain his poise. He persisted in his apparent imperturbability and asked, in a negligent tone, the while he pushed the figures off the board with a steady hand:

“Would you like to have a third game, gentlemen?”

The question was matter-of-fact, just business. What was noteworthy was that he ignored MacIver and looked straight and intently into the eyes of our rescuer. Just as a horse takes a new rider’s measure by the firmness of his seat, he must have become cognizant of who was his real, in fact his only, opponent. We could not help but follow his gaze and look eagerly at the unknown. However, before he could collect himself and formulate an answer, MacIver in his eager excitement, had already cried to him in triumph:

“Certainly, no doubt about it! But this time you’ve got to play him alone! You against Czentovic!”

What followed was quite extraordinary. The stranger, who curiously enough was still staring with a strained expression at the bare board, became affrighted upon hearing the lusty call and perceiving that he was the centre of observation. He looked confused.

“By no means, gentlemen,” he said halting, plainly perplexed.“Quite out of the question. You’ll have to leave me out. It’s twenty, no, twenty-five years since I sat at a chess-board and...and I’m only now conscious of my bad manners in crashing into your game without so much as a by your leave....Please excuse my presumption. I don’t want to interfere further.” And before we could recover from our astonishment he had left us and gone out.

“But that’s just impossible!” boomed the irascible MacIver, pounding with his fist. “Out of the question that this fellow hasn’t played chess for twenty-five years. Why, he calculated every move, every counter move, five or six in advance. You can’t shake that out of your sleeve. Just out of the question—isn’t it?”

Involuntarily, MacIver turned to Czentovic with the last question. But the champion preserved his unalterable frigidity.

“It’s not for me to express an opinion. In any case there was something queer and interesting about the man’s game; that’s why I purposely left him a chance.”

With that he rose lazily and added, in his objective manner: “If he or you gentlemen should want another game to-morrow, I’m at your disposal from three o’clock on.”

We were unable to suppress our chuckles. Everyone of us knew that the chance which Czentovic had allowed his nameless antagonist had not been prompted by generosity and that the remark was no more than a childish ruse to cover his frustration. It served to stimulate the more actively our desire to witness the utter humbling of so unshakable an arrogance. All at once we peaceable, indolent passengers were seized by a mad ambitious will to battle, for the thought that just on our ship, in mid ocean, the palm might be wrested from the champion—a record that would be flashed to every news agency in the world—fascinated us challengingly. Added to that was the lure of the mysterious which emanated from the unexpected entry of our saviour at the crucial instant, and the contrast between his almost painful modesty and the rigid self-consciousness of the professional. Who was this unknown? Had destiny utilized this opportunity to command the revelation of a yet undiscovered chess phenomenon? Or was it that we were dealing with an expert, who, for some undisclosed reason, craved anonymity? We discussed these various possibilities excitedly; the most extreme hypotheses were not sufficiently extreme to reconcile the stranger’s puzzling shyness with his surprising declaration in the face of his demonstrated mastery. On one point, however, we were of one mind:to forgo no chance of a renewal of the contest. We resolved to exert ourselves to the limit to induce our godsend to play Czentovic the next day, MacIver pledging himself to foot the bill. Having in the meantime learned from the steward that the unknown was an Austrian, I, as his compatriot, was delegated to present our request.

Soon I found our man reclining in his deck-chair, reading. In the moment of approach I used the opportunity to observe him. The sharply-chiselled head rested on the cushion in a posture of slight exhaustion; again I was struck by the extraordinary colourlessness of the comparatively youthful face framed at the temples by glistening white hair, and I got the impression, I cannot say why, that this person must have aged suddenly. No sooner did I stand before him than he rose courteously and introduced himself by a name that was familiar to me as belonging to a highly respected family of old Austria. I remembered that a bearer of that name had been an intimate friend of Schubert, and that one of the old Emperor’s physicians-in-ordinary had belonged to the same family. Dr. B. was visibly dumbfounded when I stated our wish that he should take Czentovic on. It proved that he had no idea that he had stood his ground against a champion, let alone the most famous one in the world at the moment. For some reason this news seemed to make a special impression on him, for he inquired once and again whether I was sure that his opponent was truly a recognized holder of international honours. I soon perceived that this circumstance made my mission easier, but sensing his refined feelings, I considered it discreet to withhold the fact that MacIver would be a pecuniary loser in case of an eventual defeat. After considerable hesitation Dr. B. at last consented to a match, but with the proviso that my fellow-players be warned against putting extravagant hope in his expertness.

“Because,” he added with a clouded smile, “I really don’t know whether I have the ability to play the game according to all the rules. I assure you that it was not by any means false modesty that made me say that I hadn’t touched a chess-man since my college days, say more than twenty years. And even then I had no particular gifts as a player.”

This was said so simply that I had not the slightest doubt of its truth. And yet I could not but express wonderment at his accurate memory of the details of positions in games by many different masters;he must, at least, have been greatly occupied with chess theory. Dr. B. smiled once more in that dreamy way of his.

“Greatly occupied! Heaven knows it’s true enough that I have occupied myself with chess greatly. But that happened under quite special, I might say unique, circumstances. The story of it is rather complicated and it might go as a little chapter in the story of our agreeable epoch. Do you think you would have patience for half an hour...?”

He waved towards the deck-chair next to his, I accepted the invitation gladly. There were no near neighbours. Dr. B. removed his reading spectacles, laid them to one side, and began.

“You were kind enough to say that, as a Viennese, you remembered the name of my family. I am pretty sure, however, that you could hardly have heard of the law office which my father and I conducted—and later I alone—for we had no cases that got into the papers and we avoided new clients on principle. In truth, we no longer had a regular law practice but confined ourselves exclusively to advising, and mainly to administering the fortunes of the great monasteries with which my father, once a Deputy of the Clerical Party, was closely connected. Besides—in this day and generation I am no longer obliged to keep silence about the Monarchy—we had been entrusted with the investment of the funds of certain members of the Imperial family. These connections with the Court and the Church—my uncle had been the Emperor’s household physician, another was an abbot in Seitenstetten—dated back two generations; all we had to do was to maintain them, and the task allotted to us through this inherited confidence—a quiet, I might almost say a soundless, task—really called for little more than strict discretion and dependability, two qualities which my late father possessed in full measure; he succeeded, in fact, through his prudence in preserving considerable values for his clients through the years of inflation as well as the period of collapse. Then, when Hitler seized the helm in Germany and began to raid the properties of churches and cloisters, certain negotiations and transactions, initiated from the other side of the frontier with a view to saving at least the movable valuables from confiscation, went through our hands and we two knew more about sundry secret transactions between the Curia and the Imperial house than the public will ever learn of. But the very inconspicuousness of our office—we hadn’t even a sign on the door—as well as the care with which both of us almost ostentatiously kept out of Monarchist circles, offered the safest protection from officious investigations. In fact, no Austrian official had ever suspected that during all those years the secret couriers of the Imperial family delivered and fetched their most important mail in our unpretentious fourth floor office.

“It happened that the National Socialists began, long before they armed their forces against the world, to organize a different but equally schooled and dangerous army in all contiguous countries—the legion of the unprivileged, the despised, the injured. Their so-called ‘cells’ nested themselves in every office, in every business; they had listening-posts and spies in every spot, right up to the private chambers of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg. They had their man, as alas! I learned only too late, even in our insignificant office. True, he was nothing but a wretched, ungifted clerk whom I had engaged, on the recommendation of a priest, for no other purpose than to give the office the appearance of a going concern;all that we really used him for were innocent errands, answering the telephone, and filing papers, that is to say papers of no real importance. He was not allowed to open the mail. I typed important letters myself and kept no copies. I took all essential documents to my home, and I held private interviews nowhere but in the priory of the cloister or in my uncle’s consultation-room. The measures of caution prevented the listening-post from seeing anything that went on; but some unlucky happening must have made the vain and ambitious fellow aware that he was mistrusted and that interesting things were going on behind his back. It may have been that in my absence one of the couriers made a careless reference to ‘His Majesty’ instead of the stipulated ‘Baron Fern,’ or that the rascal opened letters surreptitiously. Whatever the reason, before I had so much as suspected him he managed to get a mandate from Berlin or Munich to watch us. It was only much later, long after my imprisonment began, that I remembered how his early laziness at work had changed in the last few months to a sudden eagerness when he frequently offered, almost intrusively, to post my letters. I cannot acquit myself of a certain amount of imprudence, but after all, haven’t the greatest diplomats and generals of the world too been out-maneuvered by Hitler’s cunning? Just how precisely and lovingly the Gestapo had long been directing its attention to me was manifested tangibly by the fact that the S.S. people arrested me on the evening of the very day of Schuschnigg’s abdication, and a day before Hitler entered Vienna. Luckily I had been able to burn the most important documents upon hearing Schuschnigg’s farewell address over the radio, and the other papers, along with the indispensable vouchers for the securities held abroad for the cloisters and two archdukes, I concealed in a basket of laundry which my faithful housekeeper took to my uncle. All of this almost literally in the last minute before the fellows stove my door in.”

Dr. B. interrupted himself long enough to light a cigar. I noticed by the light of the match a nervous twitch at the right corner of his mouth that had struck me before and which, as far as I could observe, recurred every few minutes. It was merely a fleeting vibration, hardly stronger than a breath, but it imparted to the whole face a singular restlessness.

I suppose you expect that I’m going to tell you about concentration camp to which all who held faith with our old Austria were removed;about the degradations, martyrings and tortures that I suffered there. Nothing of the kind happened. I was in a different category. I was not put with those luckless ones on whom they released their accumulated resentment by corporal and spiritual degradation, but rather was assigned to that small group out of which the National Socialists hoped to squeeze money or important information. My obscure person in itself meant nothing to the Gestapo, of course. They must have guessed, though, that were the dummies, the administrators and confidants, of their most embittered adversaries, and what they expected to compel from me was incriminating evidence, evidence against the monasteries to support charges of violation by those who had selflessly taken up the cudgels for the Monarchy. They suspected, and not without good reason, that a substantial portion of the funds that we handled was still secreted and inaccessible to their lust for loot—hence their choice of me on the very first day in order to force the desired information by their trusted methods. That is why persons of my sort, to whom they looked for money or significant evidence, were not dumped into a concentration camp but were sorted out for special handling. You will recall that our Chancellor, and also Baron Rothschild, from whose family they hoped to extort millions, were not planted behind barbed wire in a prison camp but, ostensibly privileged, were lodged in individual rooms in a hotel, the Metropole, which happened to be the Gestapo headquarters; the same distinction was bestowed on my insignificant self.

“A room to oneself in a hotel—sounds pretty descent doesn’t it? But you may believe me that they had not in mind a more decent but a more crafty technique when, instead of stuffing us ‘prominent’ ones in blocks of twenty into icy barracks, they housed us in tolerably heated hotel rooms, each by himself. For the pressure by which they planned to compel the needed testimony was to be exerted more subtly than through common beating or physical torture: by the most conceivably complete isolation. They did nothing to us; they merely deposited us in the midst of nothing, knowing well that of all things the most potent pressure on the soul of man is nothingness. By placing us singly, each in an utter vacuum, in a chamber that was hermetically closed to the world without, it was calculated that the pressure created from inside, rather than cold and the scourge, would eventually cause our lips to spring apart.

“The first sight of the room allotted to me was not at all repellent. There was a door, a table, a bed, a chair, a wash-basin, a barred window. The door, however, remained closed night and day; the table remained bare of book, newspaper, pencil, paper; the window gave on a brick wall; my ego and my physical self were contained in a structure of nothingness. They had taken every object from me: my watch, that I might not know the hour; my pencil, that I might not make a note; my pocket-knife, that I might not sever a vein; even the slight narcotic of a cigarette was forbidden me. Except for the warder, who was not permitted to address me or to answer a question, I saw no human face, I heard no human voice. From dawn to night there was no sustenance for eye or ear or any sense; I was alone with myself, with my body and four or five inanimate things, rescuelessly alone with table, bed, window, and basin. One lived like a diver in his bell in the black ocean of this silence—like a diver, too, who is dimly aware that the cable to safety has already snapped and that he never will be raised from the soundless depths. There was nothing to do, nothing to hear, nothing to see; about me; everywhere and without interruption, there was nothingness, emptiness without space or time. I walked to and fro, and with me went my thoughts to and fro, to and fro, ever again. But even thoughts, insubstantial as they seem require an anchorage if they are not to revolve and circle around themselves; they too weigh down under nothingness. One waited for something from morn to eve and nothing happened. Nothing happened. One waited, waited, waited; one thought, one thought, one thought until one’s temples smarted. Nothing happened. One remained alone. Alone. Alone.

“That lasted for a fortnight, during which I lived outside of time, outside the world. If war had broken out then I would never have discovered it, for my world comprised only table, door, bed, basin, chair, window and wall every line of whose scalloped pattern embedded itself as with a steel graver in the innermost folds of my brain every time it met my eye. Then, at last, the hearings began. Suddenly I received a summons; I hardly knew whether it was day or night. I was called and led through a few corridors, I knew not whither; then I waited and knew not where it was, and found myself standing at a table behind which some uniformed men were seated. Piles of papers on the table, documents of whose contents I was in ignorance; and then came the questions, the real ones and the false, the simple and the cunning, the catch questions and the dummy questions; and whilst I answered, strange and evil fingers toyed with papers whose contents I could not surmise, and strange evil fingers wrote a record and I could not know what they wrote. But the most fearsome thing for me at those hearings was that I never could guess or figure out what the Gestapo actually knew about the goings on in my office and what they sought to worm out of me. I have already told you that at the last minute I gave my housekeeper the really incriminating documents to take to my uncle. Had he received them? Had he not received them? How far had I been betrayed by that clerk? Which letters had they intercepted and what might they not already have screwed out of some clumsy priest at one of the cloisters which we represented?

“And they heaped question on question. What securities had I bought for this cloister, with which banks had I corresponded, do I know Mr. So-and-so or do I not, had I corresponded with Switzerland and with God-knows-where? And not being able to divine what they had already dug up, every answer was fraught with danger. Were I to admit something that they didn’t know I might be unnecessarily exposing somebody to the axe, if I denied too much I harmed myself.

“The worst was not the examination. The worst was the return from the examination to my void, to the same room with the same table,the same bed, the same basin, the same wall-paper. No sooner was I by myself than I tried to recapitulate, to think of what I should have said and what I should say next time so as to divert any suspicion that a careless remark of mine might have aroused. I pondered, I combed through, I probed, I appraised every single word of testimony before the examining officers. I restated their every question and every answer that I made. I sought to sift out the part that went into the protocol, knowing well that it was all incalculable and unascertainable. But these thoughts, once given rein in empty space, rotated in my head unceasingly, always starting afresh in ever-changing combinations and insinuating themselves into my sleep.

“After every hearing by the Gestapo my own thoughts took over no less inexorably the martyrizing questions, searchings and torments, and perhaps even more horribly, for the hearings at least ended after an hour, but this repetition, thanks to the spiteful torture of solitude, ended never. And always the table, chest, bed, wallpaper, window;no diversion, not a book or magazine, not a new face, no pencil with which to jot down an item, not a match to toy with—nothing, nothing, nothing. It was only at this point that I apprehended how devilishly intelligently, with what murderous psychology, this hotel-room system was conceived. In a concentration camp one would, perhaps, have had to wheel stones until one’s hands bled and one’s feet froze in one’s boots; one would have been packed in stench and cold with a couple of dozen others. But one would have seen faces, would have had space, a tree, a star, something, anything, to stare at, while here everything stood before one unchangeably the same, always the same, maddeningly the same. There was nothing here to switch me off from my thoughts, from my delusive notions, from my diseased recapitulating. That was just what they purposed: they wanted me to gag and gag on my thoughts until they choked me and I had no choice but to spit them out at last, to admit-admit everything that they were after, finally to yield up the evidence and the people.

“I gradually became aware of how my nerves were slacking under the grisly pressure of the void and, conscious of the danger, I tensed myself to the bursting point in an effort to find or create any sort of diversion. I tried to recite or reconstruct everything I had ever memorized in order to occupy myself—the folk songs and nursery rhymes of childhood, the Homer of my high-school days, clauses from the Civil Code. Then I did problems in arithmetic, adding or dividing, but my memory was powerless without some integrating force. I was unable to concentrate on anything. One thought flickered and darted about: how much do they know? What is it that they don’t know? What did I say yesterday—what ought I to say next time?

“This simply indescribable state lasted four months. Well, four months; easy to write, just about a dozen letters! Easy to say, too: four months, a couple of syllables. The lips can articulate the sound in a quarter of a second: four months. But nobody can describe or measure or demonstrate, not to another or to himself, how long a period endures in the spaceless and timeless, nor can one explain to another how it eats into and destroys one, this nothing and nothing and nothing that is all about, everlastingly this table and bed and basin and wall-paper, and always that silence, always the same warder who shoves the food in without looking at one, always those same thoughts that revolve around one in the nothingness, until one becomes insane.

“Small signs made me disturbedly conscious that my brain was not working right. Early in the game my mind had been quite clear at the examinations; I had testified quietly and deliberately; my twofold thinking—what should I say and what not?—had still functioned. Now I could no more than articulate haltingly the simplest sentences, for while I spoke my eyes were fixed in a hypnotic stare on the pen that sped recordingly across the paper as if I wished to race after my own words. I felt myself losing my grip, I felt that the moment was coming closer and closer when, to rescue myself, I would tell all I knew and perhaps more; when, to elude the strangling grip of that nothingness, I would betray twelve persons and their secrets without deriving any advantage myself but the respite of a single breath.

“One evening I really reached that limit: the warder had just served my meal at such a moment of desperation when I suddenly shrieked after him: ‘Take me to the Board! I’ll tell everything! I want to confess! I’ll tell them where the papers are and where the money is! I’ll tell them everything! Everything!’ Fortunately he was far enough away not to hear me. Or perhaps he didn’t want to hear me.

“An event occurred in this extremest need, something unforeseeable, that offered rescue, rescue if only for a period. It was late in July, a dark, ominous, rainy day: I recall these details quite definitely because the rain was rattling against the windows of the corridor through which I was being led to the examination. I had to wait in the ante-room of the audience chamber. Always one had to wait before the session; the business of letting one wait was a trick of the game. They would first rip one’s nerves by the call, the abrupt summons from the cell in the middle of the night, and then, by the time one was keyed to the ordeal with will and reason tensed to resistance, they caused one to wait, meaningless meaningful waiting, an hour, two hours, three hours before the trial, to weary the body and humble the spirit. And they caused me to wait particularly long on this Thursday, the 27th of July; twice the hour struck while I attended, standing, in the ante-room; there is a special reason, too, for my remembering the date so exactly.

“A calendar hung in this room—it goes without saying that they never permitted me to sit down; my legs bored into my body for two hours—and I find it impossible to convey to you how my hunger for something printed, something written, made me stare at these figures, these few words, ‘27 July,’ against the wall; I wolfed them into my brain. Then I waited some more and waited and looked to see when the door would open at last, meanwhile reflecting on what my inquisitors might ask me this time, knowing well that they would ask me something quite different from that for which I was schooling myself. Yet in the face of all that, the torment of the waiting and standing was nevertheless a blessing, a delight, because this room was, after all, a different from my own, somewhat larger and with two windows instead of one, and without the bed and without the basin and without that crack in the window-sill that I had regarded a million times. The door was painted differently, a different chair stood against the wall, and to the left stood a filing cabinet with documents as well as a clothes—stand on which three or four wet militia coats hung—my torturers’ coats. So that I had something; new, something different to look at, at last something different for my starved eyes, and they clawed greedily at every detail.

“I took in every fold of those garments; I observed for example, a drop suspended from one of the wet collars and, ludicrous as it may sound to you, I waited in an inane excitement to see whether the drop would eventually detach itself and roll down or whether it would resist gravity and stay put; truly, this drop held me breathless for minutes, as if my life had been at stake. It rolled down after all, and then I counted the buttons on the coats again, eight on one, eight on another, ten on the third, and again I compared the rank marks; all of these absurd and unimportant trifles toyed with, teased, and pinched my hungry eyes with an avidity which I forgo trying to describe. And suddenly I saw something that paralysed my gaze. I had discovered a slight bulge in the side-pocket of one of the coats. I moved closer to it and thought that I recognized, by the rectangular shape of the protrusion, what this swollen pocket harboured: a book! My knees trembled: a book!

“I hadn’t had a book in my hand for four months, so that the mere idea of a book in which words appear in orderly arrangement, of sentences, pages, leaves, a book in which one could follow and stow in one’s brain new, unknown, diverting thoughts, was at once intoxicating and stupefying.

Hypnotized, my eyes rested on the little swelling which the book inside the pocket formed; they glowered at the spot as if to burn a hole in the coat. The moment came when I could no longer control my greed;involuntarily I edged nearer. The mere thought that my hands might at least feel the book through the cloth made the nerves of my fingers tingle to the nails. Almost without knowing what I did, I found myself getting closer to it.

“Happily the warder ignored my singular behaviour; indeed it may have seemed to him quite natural that a man wanted to lean against a wall, after standing erect for two hours. And then I was quite close to the coat, my hands purposely clasped behind me so as to be able to touch the coat unnoticed. I felt the stuff and the contact confirmed that here was something square, something flexible, and that it crackled softly-book, a book! And then a thought went through me like a shot:steal the book! If you can turn the trick, you can hide the book in your cell and read, read, read-read again at last. The thought, hardly lodged in me, operated like a strong poison; at once there was a singing in my ears, my heart hammered, my hands froze and resisted my bidding. But after that first numbness I pressed myself softly and insinuatingly against the coat; I pressed—always fixing the warder with my eye—the book up out of the pocket, higher and higher, with my artfully concealed hands. Then: a tug, a gentle, careful pull, and in no time the little book was in my hand. Not until now was I frightened at my deed. Retreat was no longer possible. What to do with it? I shoved the book under my trousers at the back just far enough for the belt to hold it, then gradually to the hip so that while walking I could keep it in place by holding my hands on the trouser-seams, military fashion. I had to try it out, so I moved a step from the clothes-stand, two steps, three steps. It worked. It was possible to keep the book in place while walking if I but kept pressing firmly against my belt.

“Then came the hearing. It demanded greater attention than ever on my part, for while answering I concentrated my entire effort on securing the book inconspicuously rather than on my testimony. Luckily this session proved to be a short one and I got the book safely to room, though it slipped into my trousers most dangerously while in the corridor on my way back and I had to simulate a violent fit of coughing as an excuse for bending over to get it under my belt again. But what a moment; that, as I bore it back into my inferno, alone at last yet no longer alone!

“You will suppose, of course, that my first act was to seize the book, examine it and read it. Not at all! I wanted, first of all, to savour the joy of possessing a book; the artificially prolonged and nerveinflaming desire to day-dream about the kind of book I would wish this stolen one to be: above all, very small type, narrowly spaced, with many, many letters, many, many thin leaves so that it might take long to read. And then I wished to myself that it might be one that would demand mental exertion, nothing smooth or light; rather something from which I could learn and memorize, preferably—oh, what an audacious dream!—Goethe or Homer. At last I could no longer check my greed and my curiosity. Stretched on the bed so as to arouse no suspicion in case the warder might open the door without warning, tremblingly I drew the volume from under my belt.

“The first glance produced not merely disappointment but a sort of bitter vexation, for this booty, whose acquirement was surrounded with such monsterous danger and such glowing hope, proved to be nothing more than a chess anthology, a collection of one hundred and fifty championship games. Had I not been barred, locked in, I would in my first rage, have thrown the thing through an open window; for what was to be done—what could be done—with nonsense of the kind? Like most of the other boys at school, I had now and then tried my hand at chess to kill time. But of what use was this theoretical stuff to me? You can’t play chess alone, and certainly not without chess-men and a board. Annoyed I thumbed the pages, thinking to discover reading matter of some sort, an introduction, a manual; but besides the bare rectangular reproductions of the various master games with their symbols a1-a2, Kt.-f1-Kt.-g3, etc.-to me then unintelligible, I found nothing. All of it appeared to me as a kind of algebra the key to which was hidden. Only gradually I puzzled out that the letters a, b, c stood for the vertical rows, the figures 1 to 8 for the rows across, and indicated the current position of each figure; thus these purely graphic expressions did, nevertheless, attain to speech.

“Who knows, I thought, if I were able to devise a chess-board in my cell I could follow these names through; and it seemed like a sign from heaven that the weave of my bedspread disclosed a coarse checker-work. With proper manipulation it yielded a field of sixty-four squares. I tore out the first leaf and concealed the book under my mattress. Then, from bits of bread that I sacrificed, I began to mould king, queen, and the other figures (with ludicrous results, of course), and after no end of effort I was finally able to undertake on the bedspread the reproduction of the positions pictured in the chess book. But my absurd bread-crumb figures, half of which I had covered with dust to differentiate them from ‘white’ ones, proved utterly inadequate when I tried to pursue the printed game. I was all confusion in those first days; I would have to start a game afresh five times, ten times, twenty times. But who on earth had so much unused and useless time as I, slave of emptiness, and who commanded so much immeasurable greed and patience!

“It took me six days to play the game to the end with out an error, and in a week after that I no longer required the chess-men to comprehend the relative positions and in just one more week I was able to dispense with the bedspread; the printed symbols, a1, a2, c7, c8, at first abstractions to me, automatically transformed themselves into visual plastic positions. The transposition had been accomplished perfectly. I had projected the chess-board and its figures within myself and, thanks to the bare rules, observed the immediate set-up just as a practised musician hears all instruments singly and in combination upon merely glancing at a printed score.

“It cost me no effort, after another fortnight, to play every game in the book from memory or, in chess language, blind; and only then did I begin to understand the limitless benefaction which my impertinent theft constituted. For I had acquired an occupation—a senseless, a purposeless one if you wish—yet one that negated the nothingness that enveloped me; the one hundred and fifty championship games equipped me with a weapon against the strangling monotony of space and time.

“From then on, to conserve the charm of this new interest without interruption, I divided my day precisely: two games in the morning, two in the afternoon, a quick recapitulation in the evening. That served to fill my day which previously had been as shapeless as jelly; I had something to do that did not tire me, for a wonderful feature of chess is that through confining mental energy to a strictly bounded field the brain does not flag even under the most strained concentration; rather it makes more acute its agility and energy. In the course of time the repetition of the master games, which had at first been mechanical, awakened an artistic, a pleasurable comprehension in me. I learned to understand the refinements, the tricks and feints in attack and defence; I grasped the technique of thinking ahead, planning combinations and riposting, and soon recognized the personal note of each champion in his individual method as infallibly as one spots a particular poet on hearing only a few lines. That which began as a mere time-killing occupation became a joy, and the personalities of such great chess strategists as Alekhin, Lasker, Boguljobov and Tartakover entered into my solitude as beloved comrades.

“My silent cell was constantly and variously peopled, and the very regularity of my exercises restored my already impaired intellectual capacity; my brain seemed refreshed and, because of constant disciplined thinking, even keenly whetted. My ability to think more clearly and concisely manifested itself, above all, at the hearings;unconsciously I had perfected myself at the chess-board in defending myself against false threats and masked dodges, from this time on I gave them no openings at the sessions and I even harboured the thought that the Gestapo men began, after a while, to regard me with a certain respect. Possibly they asked themselves, seeing so many others collapse, from what secret sources I alone found strength for such unshakable resistance.

“This period of happiness in which I played through the one hundred and fifty games in that book systematically, day by day, continued for about two and a half to three months. Then I arrived unexpectedly at a dead point. Suddenly I found myself once more facing nothingness. For by the time that I had played through each one of these games innumerable times, the charm of novelty and surprise was lost, the exciting and stimulating power was exhausted. What purpose did it serve to repeat again and again games whose every move I had long since memorized? No sooner did I make an opening move than the whole thing unravelled of itself; there was no surprise, no tension, no problem. At this point I would have needed another book with more games to keep me busy, to engage the mental effort that had become indispensable to divert me. This being totally impossible, my madness could take but one course: instead of the old games I had to devise new ones myself. I had to try to play the game with myself or, rather, against myself.

“I have no idea to what extent you have given thought to the intellectual status of this game of games. But one doesn’t have to reflect deeply to see that if pure chance can determine a game of calculation, it is an absurdity in logic to play against oneself. The fundamental attraction of chess lies, after all, in the fact that its strategy develops in different wise in two different brains, that in this mental battle Black,ignorant of White’s immediate manoeuvres, seeks constantly to guess and cross them, while White, for his part, strives to penetrate Black’s secret purposes and to outstrip and parry them. If one person tried to be both Black and White you have the preposterous situation that one and the same brain at once knows something and yet does not know it;that, functioning as White’s partner, it can instantly obey a command to forget what, a moment earlier as Black’s partner, it desired and plotted. Such cerebral duality really implies a complete cleavage of the conscious, a lighting up or dimming of the brain function at pleasure as with a switch; in short, to want to play against oneself at chess is about as paradoxical as to want to jump over one’s own shadow.

“Well, briefly, in my desperation I tried this impossibility, this absurdity, for months. There was no choice but this nonsense if I was not to become quite insane or slowly to disintegrate mentally. The fearful state that I was in compelled me at least to attempt this split between Black ego and White ego so as not to be crushed by the horrible nothingness that bore in on me.”

Dr. B. relaxed in his deck-chair and closed his eyes for a minute. It seemed as if he were exerting his will to suppress disturbing recollection. Once again the left corner of his mouth twitched in that strange and evidently uncontrollable manner. Then he settled himself a little more erectly.

“Well, then, I hope I’ve made it all pretty intelligible to this point. I’m sorry, but I doubt greatly that the rest of it can be pictured quite as clearly. This new occupation, you see, called for so unconditional a harnessing of the brain as to make any simultaneous self-control impossible. I have already intimated my opinion that chess contest with oneself spells nonsense, but there is a minimal possibility for even such an absurdity if a real chess-board is present, because the board, being tangible, affords a sense of distance, a material extraterritoriality. Before a real chess-board with real chessmen you can stop to think things over, and you can place yourself physically first on this side of the table, then on the other, to fix in your eyes how the scene looks to Black and how it looks to White. Obliged as I was to conduct these contests against myself—or with myself, as you please—on an imaginary field, so I was obliged to keep fixedly in mind the current set-up on the sixty four squares, and besides, to make advance calculations as to the possible further moves open to each player, which meant—I know how mad this must sound to you—imagining double, triply, no, imagining sextuply, duodecibly for each one of my egos, always four or five moves in advance.

“Please don’t think that I expect you to follow through the involutions of this madness. In these plays in the abstract space of fantasy I had to figure out the next four or five moves in my capacity of White, likewise as Black, thus considering every possible future combination with two brains, so to speak, White’s brain and Black’s brain. But even this auto-cleaving of personality was not most dangerous aspect of my abstruse experiment; rather it was that with the need to play independently I lost my foothold and fell into a bottomless pit. Then mere replaying of championship games, which I had been indulging in during the preceding weeks, had been, after all, no more than a feat of repetition, a straight recapitulation of given material and, as such, no greater strain than to memorize poetry or learn sections of the Civil Code by heart; it was a delimited, disciplined function and thus an excellent mental exercise. My two morning games, my two in the afternoon, represented a definite task that I was able to perform coolly; it was a substitute for normal occupation and, moreover, if I erred in the progress of a game or forgot the next move, I always had recourse to the book. It was only because the replaying of others’ games left my self out of the picture that this activity served to soothe and heal my shattered nerves; it was all one to me whether Black or White was victor, for was it not Alekhin or Boguljobov who sought the palm, while my own person, my reason, my soul derived satisfaction as observer, as fancier of the niceties of those jousts as they worked out. From the moment at which I tried to play against myself I began, unconsciously, to challenge myself. Each of my egos, my Black ego and my White ego, had to contest against the other and become the centre, each on its own, of an ambition, an impatience to win, to conquer, after each move that I made as Ego Black I was in a fever of curiosity as to what Ego White would do. Each of my egos felt triumphant when the other made a bad move and likewise suffered chagrin at similar clumsiness of its own.

“All that sounds senseless, and in fact such a self-produced schizophrenia, such a split consciousness with its fund of dangerous excitement, would be unthinkable in a person under normal conditions. Don’t forget, though that I had been violently torn from all normality, innocently charged and behind bars, for months martyrized by the refined employment of solitude—a man seeking an object against which to discharge his long-accumulated rage. And as I had nothing else than this insane match with myself, that rage, that lust for revenge, canalized itself fanatically into the game. Some-thing in me wanted to justify itself, but there was only this other self with which I could wrestle; so while the game was on, an almost maniac excitement waxed in me. In the beginning my deliberations were still quiet and imposed; I would pause between one game and the next so as to recover from the effort;but little by little my frayed nerves forbade all respite. No sooner had Ego White made a move than Ego Black feverishly plunged a piece forward; scarcely had a game ended but I challenged myself to another, for each time, of course, one of my chess-egos was beaten by the other and demanded satisfaction.

“I shall never be able to tell, even approximately, how many games I played against myself during those months in my cell as a result of this crazy insatiability; a thousand perhaps, perhaps more. It was an obsession against which I could not arm myself; from dawn to night I thought of nothing but knights and pawns, rooks and kings, and a b and c, and ‘Mate!’ and ‘Castle’; my entire being and every sense embraced the checkered board. The joy of play became a lust for play;the lust for play became a compulsion to play, a frenetic rage, a mania which saturated not only my waking hours but eventually my sleep, too. I could think only in terms of chess, only in chess moves, chess problems; sometimes I would wake with a damp brow and become aware that a game had unconsciously continued in my sleep, and if I dreamt of persons it was exclusively in the moves of the bishop, the rook in the advance and retreat of the knight’s move.

“Even when I was brought before the examining Board I was no longer able to keep my thoughts within the bounds of my responsibilities; I’m inclined to think that I must have expressed myself confusedly at the last sessions, for my judges would glance at one another strangely. Actually I was merely waiting, while they questioned and deliberated, in my cursed eagerness to be led back to my cell so that I could resume my mad round, to start a fresh game, and another and another. Every interruption disturbed me; even the quarter-hour in which the warder cleaned up the room, the two minutes in which he served my meals, tortured my feverish impatience; sometimes the midday meal stood untouched on the tray at evening because the game made me forgetful of food. The only physical sensation that I experienced was a terrible thirst; the fever of this constant thinking and playing must already have manifested itself then; I emptied the bottle in two swallows and begged the warder for more, and nevertheless felt my tongue dry in my mouth in the next minute.

“Finally my excitement during the games rose—by that time I did nothing else from morning till night—to such a height that I was no longer able to sit still for a minute; uninterruptedly, while cogitating on a move, I would walk to and fro, quicker and quicker, to and fro, to and fro, and the nearer the approach to the decisive moment of the game the hotter my steps; the lust to win, to victory, to victory over myself increased to a sort of rage; I trembled with impatience, for the one chess-ego in me was always too slow for the other. One would whip the other forward and, absurd as this may seem to you, I would call angrily,‘quicker, quicker!’ or ‘Go on, go on!’ when the one self in me failed to riposte to the other’s thrust quickly enough. It goes without saying that I am now fully aware that this state of mine was nothing less than a pathological form of overwrought mind for which I can find no other name than one not yet known to medical annals: chess poisoning.

“The time came when this monomania, this obsession, attacked my body as well as my brain. I lost weight, my sleep was restless and disturbed, upon waking I had to make great efforts to compel my leaded lids to open; sometimes I was so weak that when I grasped a glass I could scarcely raise it to my lips, my hands trembled so; but no sooner did the game begin than a mad power seized me: I rushed up and down, up and down with fists clenched, and I would sometimes hear my own voice as through a reddish fog, shouting hoarsely and angrily at myself,‘Check!’ or ‘Mate!’

“How this horrible, indescribable condition reached its crisis is something that I am unable to report. All that I know is that I woke one morning and the waking was different from usual. My body was no longer a burden, so to speak; I rested softly and easily. A tight, agreeable fatigue, such as I had not known for months, lay on my eyelids; the feeling was so warm and benignant that I couldn’t bring myself to open my eyes. For minutes I lay awake and continued to enjoy this heavy soddenness, this tepid reclining in agreeable stupefaction. All at once I seemed to hear voices behind me, living human voices, low whispering voices that spoke words; and you can’t possibly imagine my delight, for months had elapsed, perhaps a year, since I had heard other words than the hard, sharp, evil ones from my judges. 'You’re dreaming,’ I said to myself. ‘You’re dreaming! Don’t, in any circumstances, open your eyes. Let the dream last or you’ll again see the cursed cell about you, the chair and wash-stand and the table and the wall-paper with the eternal pattern. You’re dreaming—keep on dreaming!’

But curiosity held the upper hand. Slowly and carefully I raised my lids. A miracle! It was a different room in which I found myself, a room wider and more ample than my hotel cell. An unbarred window emitted light freely and permitted a view of trees, green trees swaying in the wind, instead of my bald brick partition; the walls shone white and smooth, above above me a high white ceiling. I lay in a new and unaccustomed bed and—surely, it was no dream—human voices whispered behind me.

“In my surprise I must have made an abrupt, involuntary movement, for at once I heard an approaching step. A woman came softly, a woman with a white head-dress, a nurse, a Sister. A delighted shudder ran through me: I had seen no woman for a year. I stared at the lovely apparition, and it must have been a glance of wild ecstasy, for she admonished me, ‘quiet, don’t move.’ I hung only on her voice, for was not this a person who talked! Was there still somebody on earth who did not interrogate me, torture me? And to top it all—ungraspable wonder!—a soft, warm, almost tender woman’s voice. I stared hungrily at her mouth, for the year of inferno had made it seem to me impossible that one person might speak kindly to another. She smiled at me—yes, she smiled; then there still were people who could smile benevolently—put a warning finger to her lips, and went off noiselessly. But I could not obey her order; I was not yet sated with the miracle. I tried to wrench myself into a sitting posture so as to follow with my eyes this wonder of a human being who was kind. But when I reached out to support my weight on the edge of the bed something failed me. In place of my right hand, fingers, and wrist I became aware of something foreign—a thick, large, white cushion, obviously a comprehensive bandage. At first I gaped uncomprehendingly at this bulky object, then slowly I began to grasp where I was and to reflect on what could have happened to me. They must have injured me, or I had done some damage to my hand myself. The place was a hospital.

“The physician, an amiable elderly man, turned up at noon. He knew my family and made so genial an allusion to my uncle, the Imperial household doctor, as to create the impression that he was well disposed towards me. In the course of conversation he put all sorts of questions, one of which, in particular, astonished me: Was I a mathematician or a chemist? I answered in the negative.

“‘Strange,’ he murmured. ‘In your fever you cried out such unusual formulas, c3, c4. We could make nothing of it.’

“I asked him what had happened to me. He smiled oddly.

“‘Nothing too serious. An acute irritation of the nerves,’ and added in a low voice, after looking carefully around, ‘And quite intelligible, of course. Let’s see, it was March 13, wasn’t it!’

“I nodded.

“‘No wonder, with that system,’ he admitted. ‘You’re not the first. But don’t worry.’ The manner of his soothing speech and sympathetic smile convinced me that I was in a safe haven.

“A couple of days thereafter the doctor told me quite of his own accord what had taken place. The warder had heard shrieks from my cell and thought, at first, that I was disputing with somebody who had broken in. But no sooner had he shown himself at the door than I made for him, shouted wildly something that sounded like ‘Aren’t you ever going to move, you rascal, you coward?’ grasped at his windpipe, and finally attacked him so ferociously that he had to call for help. Then when they were dragging me, in my mad rage, for medical examination, I had suddenly broken loose and thrust myself against the window in the corridor, thereby lacerating my hand—see this deep scar. I had been in a sort of brain fever during the first few days in the hospital, but now he found my perceptive faculties quite in order. ‘To be sure,’ said he under his voice, it’s just as well that I don’t report that higher up or they may still come and fetch you back there. Depend on me, I’ll do my best.’

“Whatever it was that this benevolent doctor told my torturers about me is beyond my knowledge. In any case, he achieved what he sought to achieve: my release. It may be that he declared me irresponsible, or it may be that my importance to the Gestapo had diminished, for Hitler had since occupied Bohemia, thus liquidating the case of Austria. I had merely to sign an undertaking to leave the country within a fortnight, and this period was so filled with the multitude of formalities that now surround a journey—military certificate, police, tax and health certificates, passport, visas—as to leave me no time to brood over the past. Apparently one’s brain is controlled by secret, regulatory powers which automatically switch off whatever may annoy or endanger the mind, for every time I wanted to ponder on my imprisonment the light in my brain seemed to go off; only after many weeks, indeed only now, on this ship, have I plucked up enough courage to pass in review all that I lived through.

“After all this you will understand my unbecoming and perhaps strange conduct to your friends. It was only by chance that I was strolling through the smoking-room and saw them sitting at the chessboard; my feet seemed rooted where I stood from astonishment and fright. For I had totally forgotten that one can play chess with a real board and real figures, forgotten that two physically separate persons sit opposite each other at this game. Truly it took me a few minutes before I remembered that what those men were playing was what I had been playing, against myself during the months of my helplessness. The cipher-code which served me in my worthy exercises was but a substitute, a symbol for these solid figures; my astonishment that this pushing about of pieces on the board was the same as the imaginary fantastics in my mind must have been like that of an astronomer who, after complicated paper calculations as to the existence of a new planet, eventually really sees it in the sky as clear white, substantial body. I stared at the board as if magnetized, and saw there my setup, knight, rook, king, queen, and pawns, as genuine figures carved out of wood. In order to get the hang of the game I had voluntarily to transmute it from my abstract realm of numbers and letters into the movable figures. Gradually I was overcome with curiosity to observe a real contest between two players. Then followed that regrettable and impolite interference of mine with your game. But that mistaken move of your friend’s was like a stab at my heart. It was pure instinct that made me hold him back, a quite impulsive grasp like that with which one involuntarily seizes a child leaning over a banister. It was not until afterwards that I became conscious of the impropriety of my intrusiveness.”

I hastened to assure Dr. B. that we were all happy about the incident to which we owed his acquaintance and that, after what he had confided in me, I would be doubly interested in the opportunity to see him at tomorrow’s improvised tournament.

“Really, you mustn’t expect too much. It will be nothing but a test for me—a test whether I—whether I’m at all capable of dealing with chess in a normal way, in a game with a real board with substantial chess-men and a living opponent—for now I doubt more than ever that those hundreds, they may have been thousands, of games that I played were real games according to the rules, and not merely a sort of dreamchess, fever-chess, a delirium in which, as always in dreams, one skips intermediate steps. Surely you do not seriously believe that I would measure myself against a champion, that I expect to give tit for tat to the greatest one in the world. What interests and fascinates me is nothing but the humous curiosity to discover whether what went on in my cell was chess or madness, whether I was then at the dangerous brink or already beyond it—that’s all, nothing else.”

At this moment the gong summoning passengers to dinner was heard. The conversation must have lasted almost two hours, for Dr.B. had told me his story in much greater detail than that in which I assemble it. I thanked him warmly and took my leave. I had hardly covered the length of the deck when he was alongside me visibly nervous, saying with something of a stutter:

“One thing more. Will you please tell your friends beforehand, so that it should not later seem discourteous, that I will play only one game....The idea is merely to close an old account—a final settlement, not a new beginning....I can’t afford to sink back a second time into that passionate play-fever that I recall with nothing but horror. And besidesbesides, the doctor warned me, expressly warned me. Everyone who has ever succumbed to a mania remains for ever in jeopardy, and a sufferer from chess poisoning—even if discharged as cured—had better keep away from a chess-board. You understand, then—only this one experimental game for myself and no more.”

We assembled in the smoking-room the next day promptly at the appointed hour, three o’clock. Our circle had increased by yet two more lovers of the royal game, two ship’s officers who had obtained special leave from duty to watch the tourney. Czentovic, too, not as on the preceding day, was on time. After the usual choice of colours there began the memorable game this homo obscurissimus against the celebrated master.

I regret that it was played for thoroughly incompetent observers like us, and that its course is as completely lost to the annals of the art of chess as are Beethoven’s improvisations to music. True, we tried to piece it together from our collective memory on the following afternoons but in vain; very likely, in the passion of the moment we had allowed our interest to centre on the players rather than on the game. For the intellectual contrast between the contestants became physically plastic according to their manner as the play proceeded. Czentovic, the creature of routine, remained the entire time as immobile as a block, his eyes unalterably fixed on the board; thinking seemed to cost him almost physical effort that called for extreme concentration on the part of every organ. Dr. B., on the other hand, was completely slack and unconstrained. Like the true dilettante, in the best sense of the word, to whom only the play in play—the diletto—gives joy, he relaxed fully,explained moves to us in easy conversation during the early intervals, lighted a cigarette carelessly, and glanced at the board for a minute only when it came his turn to play. Each time it seemed as if he had expected just the move that his antagonist made.

The perfunctory moves came off quite rapidly. It was not until the seventh or eighth that something like a definite plan seemed to develop. Czentovic prolonged his periods of reflection; by that we sensed that the actual battle for the lead was setting in. But, to be quite frank, the gradual development of the situation represented to us lay observers, as usually in tournament games, something of a disappointment. The more the pieces wove themselves into a singular design the more impenetrable became the real lie of the land. We could not discern what one or the other rival purposed or which of the two had the advantage. We noticed merely that certain pieces insinuated themselves forward like levers to undermine the enemy front, but since every move of these superior players was part of a combination that comprised a plan for several moves ahead, we were unable to detect the strategy of their back-and-forth.

An oppressive fatigue took possession of us, largely because of Czentovic’s interminable cogitation between moves, which eventually produced visible irritation in our friend too. I observed uneasily now the longer the game stretched out, he became increasingly restless, moving about in his chair, nervously lighting a succession of cigarettes, occasionally seizing a pencil to make a note. He would order mineral water and gulp it down, glass after glass; it was plain that his mind was working a hundred times faster than Czentovic’s. Every time the latter, after endless reflection, decided to push a piece forward with his heavy hand, our friend would smile like one who encounters something long expected and make an immediate riposte. In his nimble mind he must have calculated every possibility that lay open to his opponent;the longer Czentovic took to make a decision the more his impatience grew, and during the waiting his lips narrowed into an angry and almost inimical line. Czentovic, however, did not allow himself to be hurried. He deliberated, stiff and silent, and increased the length of the pauses the more the field became denuded of figures. By the forty-second move, after one and a half hours, we sat limply by, almost indifferent to what was going on in the arena. One of the ship's officers had already departed, another was reading a book and would look up only when a piece had been moved. Then, suddenly at a move of Czentovic’s, the unexpected happened. As soon as Dr. B. perceived that Czentovic took hold of the bishop to move it, he crouched like a cat about to spring. His whole body trembled and Czentovic had no sooner executed his intention than he pushed his queen forward and said loudly and triumphantly, “There! That’s done with!”, fell back in his chair, his arms crossed over his breast and looked challengingly at Czentovic. As he spoke his pupils gleamed with a hot light.

Impulsively we bent over the board to figure out the significance of the move so ostentatiously announced. At first blush no direct threat was observable. Our friend’s statement, then, had reference to some development that we short-thoughted amateurs could not prefigure. Czentovic was the only one among us who had not stirred at the provocative call; he remained as still as if the insulting “Done with” had glanced of him unheard. Nothing happened. Everybody held his breath and at once the ticking of the clock that stood on the table to measure the moves became audible. Three minutes passed, seven minutes, eight minutes—Czentovic was motionless, but I thought I noticed an inner tension that became manifest in the greater distension of his thick nostrils.

This silent waiting seemed to be as unbearable to our friend as to us. He shoved his chair back, rose abruptly and began to traverse the smoking room, first slowly, then quicker and quicker. Those present looked at him wonderingly, but none with greater uneasiness than I, for I perceived that in spite of his vehemence this pacing never deviated from a uniform span; it was as if, in this awful space, he would each time come plump against an invisible cupboard that obliged him to reverse his steps. Shuddering, I recognized that it was an unconscious reproduction of the pacing in his erstwhile cell; during those months of incarceration it must have been exactly thus that he rushed to and fro, like a caged animal; his hands must have been clenched and his shoulders hunched exactly like this; it must have been like this that he pelted forward and back a thousand times there, the red lights of madness in his paralysed though feverish stare. Yet his mental control seemed still fully intact, for from time to time he turned impatiently towards the table to see if Czentovic had made up his mind. But time stretched to nine, then ten minutes.

What occurred then, at last, was something that none could have predicted. Czentovic slowly raised his heavy hand, which, until then, had rested inert on the table. Tautly we all watched for the upshot. Czentovic, however, moved no piece, but instead, with the back of his hand pushed, with one slow determined sweep, all the figures from the board. It took us a moment to comprehend: he gave up the game. He had capitulated in order that we might not witness his being mated. The impossible had come to pass: the champion of the world, victor at innumerable tournaments, had struck his colours before an unknown man, who hadn’t touched a chess-board for twenty or twenty-five years. Our friend the anonymous, the ignotus, had overcome the greatest chess master on earth in open battle.

Automatically, in the excitement, one after another rose to his feet;each was animated by the feeling that he must give vent to the joyous shock by saying or doing something. Only one remained stolidly at rest:Czentovic. After a measured interval he lifted his head and directed a stony look at our friend.

“Another game?” he asked.

“Naturally,” answered Dr. B. with an enthusiasm that was disturbing to me, and he seated himself, even before I could remind him of his own stipulation to play only once, and began to set up the figures in feverish haste. He pushed them about in such heat that a pawn twice slid from his trembling fingers to the floor; the pained discomfort that his unnatural excitement had already produced in me grew to something like fear. For this previously calm and quiet person had become visibly exalted; the twitching of his mouth was more frequent and in every limb he shook as with fever.

“Don’t,” I said softly to him. “No more now; you’ve had enough for to-day. It’s too much of a strain for you.”

“Strain! Ha!” and he laughed loudly and spitefully. “I could have played seventeen games during that slow ride. The only strain is for me to keep awake.—Well, aren’t you ever going to begin?”

These last words had been addressed in an impetuous, almost rude tone to Czentovic. The latter glanced at him quietly and evenly, but there was something of a clenched fist in that adamantine stubborn glance. On the instant a new element had entered: a dangerous tension a passionate hate. No longer were they two players in a sporting way; they were two enemies sworn to destroy each other. Czentovic hesitated long before making the first move, and I had a definite sensation that he was delaying on purpose. No question but that this seasoned tactician had long since discovered that just such dilatoriness wearied and irritated his antagonist. He used no less than four minutes for the normal, the simplest of openings, moving the king’s pawn two spaces. Instantly our friend advanced his king’s pawn, but again Czentovic was responsible for an eternal, intolerable pause; it was like waiting with beating heart for the thunder-clap after a streak of fiery lightning, and waiting—with no thunder forthcoming. Czentovic never stirred. He meditated quietly, slowly, and as I felt, increasingly, maliciously slowly—which gave me plenty of time to observe Dr. B. He had just about consumed his third glass of water; it came to my mind that he had spoken of his feverish thirst in his cell. Every symptom of abnormal excitement was plainly present: I saw his forehead grow moist and the scar on his hand become redder and more sharply outlined. Still, however, he held himself in rein. It was not until the fourth move, when Czentovic again pondered exasperatingly, that he forgot himself and exploded with, “Aren’t you ever going to move?”

Czentovic looked up coldly. “As I remember it, we agreed on a tenminute limit. It is a principle with me not to make it less.”

Dr. B. bit his lips. I noticed under the table the growing restlessness with which he lifted and lowered the sole of his shoe, and I could not control the nervousness the that overcame me because of the oppressive prescience of some insane thing that was boiling in him. As a matter of fact, there was a second encounter at the eighth move. Dr. B., whose self-control diminished with the increasing periods of waiting, could no longer conceal his tension; he was restless in his seat and unconsciously began to drum on the table with his fingers. Again Czentovic raised his peasant head.

“May I ask you not to drum. It disturbs me. I can’t play with that going on.”

“Ha, ha,” answered Dr. B. with a short laugh, “One can see that.”

Czentovic flushed. “What do you mean by that?” he asked, sharply and evilly.

Dr. B. gave another curt and spiteful laugh. “Nothing except that it’s plain that you’re nervous.”

Czentovic lowered his head and said nothing. Seven minutes elapsed before he made his move, and that was the funereal tempo at which the game dragged on. Czentovic became correspondingly stonier;in the end he utilized the maximum time before determining on a move, and from interval to interval the conduct of our friend became stranger and stranger. It appeared as if he no longer had any interest in the game but was occupied with something quite different. He abandoned his excited pacing and remained seated motionlessly. Starring into the void with a vacant and almost insane look, he uninterruptedly muttered unintelligible words; either he was absorbed in endless combinations or—and, this was my inner suspicion—he was working out quite other games, for each time that Czentovic got to the point, a move he had to be recalled from his absent state. Then it took a minute or two to orient himself. My conviction grew that he had really forgotten all about Czentovic and the rest of us in this cold aspect of his insanity which might at any instant discharge itself violently. Surely enough, at the nineteenth move the crisis came. No sooner had Czentovic executed his play than Dr. B., giving no more than a cursory look at the board, suddenly pushed his bishop three spaces forward and shouted so loudly that we all started.

“Check! Check, the king!”

Every eye was on the board in anticipation of an extraordinary move. Then, after a minute, there was an unexpected development. Very slowly Czentovic tilted his head and looked—which he had never done before—from one face to another. Something seemed to afford him a rich enjoyment, for little by little his lips gave expression to a satisfied and scornful smile. Only after he had savoured to the full the triumph which was still unintelligible to us did he address us, saying with mock deference:

“Sorry—but I see no check. Perhaps one of you gentlemen can see my king in check!”

We looked at the board and then uneasily over at Dr. B. Czentovic’s king was fully covered against the bishop by a pawn—a child could see that—thus the king could not possibly be in check. We turned one to the other. Might not our friend in his agitation have pushed a piece over the line, a square too far one way or the other? His attention arrested by our silence, Dr. B. now stared at the board and began, stutteringly:

“But the king ought to be on f7—that’s wrong, all wrong—Your move was wrong! All the pieces are misplaced-the pawn should be on g5 and not on g4. Why, that’s quite a different game – that’s—”

He halted abruptly. I had seized his arm roughly, or rather I had pinched it so hard that even in his feverish bewilderment he could not but feel my grip. He turned and looked at me like a somnambulist.

“What—what do you want?”

I only said “Remember!” at the same time lightly drawing my finger over the scar on his hand. Automatically he followed my gesture, his eyes fixed glassily on the blood-red streak. Suddenly he began to tremble and his body shook.

“For God’s sake,” he whispered with pale lips. “Have I said or done something silly? Is it possible that I’m again...?”

“No,” I said, in a low voice, “But you have to stop the game at once. It’s high time. Recollect what the doctor said.”

With a single movement Dr. B. was on his feet. “I have to apologize for my stupid mistake,” he said in his old, polite voice, inclining himself to Czentovic. “What I said was plain nonsense, of course. It goes without saying that the game is yours.” Then to us: “My apologies to your gentlemen, also. But I warned you beforehand not to expect too much from me. Forgive the disgrace-it is the last time that I yield to the temptation of chess.”

He bowed and left in the same modest and mysterious manner in which he had first appeared before us. I alone knew why this man would never again touch a chess-board, while the others, a bit confused, stood around with that vague feeling of having narrowly escaped something uncomfortable and dangerous. “Damned fool,” MacIver grumbled in his disappointment. Last of all, Czentovic rose from his chair, half glancing at the unfinished game.

“Too bad,” he said generously. “The attack wasn’t at all badly conceived. The man certainly has lots of talent for an amateur.”