From my own experience I was well aware of the mysterious attraction of the “royal game,” which, alone among the games devised by man, regally eschews the tyranny of chance and awards its palms of victory only to the intellect, or rather to a certain type of intellectual gift. But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, hovering between these categories like Muhammad’s coffin between heaven and earth, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance and yet demonstrably more durable in its essence and actual form than all books and works, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit? Where does it begin, where does it end? Any child can learn its basic rules, any amateur can try his hand at it; and yet, within the inalterable confines of a chessboard, masters unlike any others evolve, people with a talent for chess and chess alone, special geniuses whose gifts of imagination, patience and skill are just as precisely apportioned as those of mathematicians, poets, and musicians, but differently arranged and combined. In earlier times, when there was a rage for physiognomy, a Gall might have dissected the brains of such chess champions to determine whether there was a special convolution in their gray matter, a kind of chess muscle or chess bump more strongly marked than in the skulls of others. And how excited such a physiognomist would have been by the case of a Czentovic, in whom this narrow genius seems embedded in absolute intellectual inertia like a single gold thread in a hundred-weight of barren rock. In principle I have always found it easy to understand that such a unique, ingenious game would have to produce its own wizards. Yet how difficult, how impossible it is to imagine the life of an intellectually active person who reduces the world to a shuttle between black and white, who seeks fulfillment in a mere to-and-fro, forward-and-back of thirty-two pieces, someone for whom a new opening that allows the knight to be advanced instead of the pawn is in itself a great accomplishment and a meager little piece of immortality in a corner of a chess book—someone, someone with a brain in his head, who, without going mad, continues over and over for ten, twenty, thirty, forty years to devote all the force of his thought to the ridiculous end of cornering a wooden king on a wooden board!

And now that one such phenomenon, one such strange genius or mysterious simpleton was for the first time physically quite nearby, six cabins away from me on the same ship, alas! I, for whom curiosity about things of the mind is more and more becoming a kind of passion, was unable to approach him. I began to think up the most absurd ruses: I would tickle his vanity by pretending to interview him for an important newspaper, perhaps; or pique his avarice by proposing a lucrative tournament in Scotland. But finally I remembered a hunter’s trick, that the most reliable technique for decoying the wood grouse was to imitate its mating call. What could be more effective in attracting the attention of a chess champion than to play chess oneself?

Now I have never in my life been a serious chess player; my dealings with the game have been purely frivolous, for pleasure alone. If I spend an hour in front of the board, this is by no means to exert myself but, on the contrary, to relieve emotional tension. I “play” chess in the truest sense, while the others, the real chess players, “work” it, if I may use the word in this daring new way. But, in chess as in love, a partner is indispensable, and at that time I did not yet know if there were other chess lovers on board apart from us. To lure them out of their holes, I laid a primitive trap in the smoking room. Though my wife’s game is even weaker than my own, she and I, the bird-catchers, sat at a chessboard. And in fact someone passing through paused for a moment before we had made even six moves and a second asked permission to look on; finally the desired partner turned up too, and challenged me to a game. His name was McConnor, a Scottish civil engineer who, as I soon heard, had made a fortune in oil drilling in California. To the eye he was a thickset individual with heavy, well-defined, almost rectilinear jowls, strong teeth, and a high complexion whose pronounced ruddiness was probably at least partly due to plenty of whisky. The strikingly broad, almost athletically powerful shoulders unfortunately reflected the character of his playing too, for this Mr. McConnor was one of those self-obsessed big wheels who feel personally diminished by a defeat in even the most trivial game. Accustomed to ruthlessly asserting himself in life and spoiled by actual success, this un-yielding self-made man was so unshakably imbued with a sense of his own superiority that any resistance infuriated him, as though it were some inadmissible revolt, practically an affront. When he lost the first game, he grew sullen and began proclaiming, dictatorially and longwindedly, that this could only have happened because his attention had wandered for a moment; he blamed his failure in the third game on noise from the next room. He was unable to lose without immediately demanding a return match. At first I was amused by this dogged pride; finally I accepted it as an unavoidable side effect of my real purpose, to lure the world champion to our table.

On the third day the plan succeeded, or partly. Whether Czentovic had looked through the porthole on the promenade deck and seen us in front of the chessboard or had just happened to honor the smoking room with his presence—in any event, as soon as he saw two incompetents practicing his art, he was compelled to step closer and while maintaining a careful distance cast an appraising glance at our board. McConnor was just then making a move. And even this one move seemed to be enough to tell Czentovic that it would be unworthy of a master like him to take any further interest in our amateurish efforts. As naturally as any of us might toss aside a bad detective novel in a bookstore without even opening it, he walked away from our table and out of the smoking room. “Weighed in the balance and found wanting,” I thought, a little annoyed by this cool, contemptuous gaze; to somehow give vent to my ill-humor, I said to McConnor:

“The champion didn’t seem to think much of your move.”

“What champion?”

I explained to him that the gentleman who had just passed by and looked with such disapproval at our game was the chess champion Czentovic. Well, I added, the two of us would get over it, we’d come to terms with his lofty contempt without heartache; beggars couldn’t be choosers. But my offhand remark had a surprising and completely unexpected effect on McConnor.