Chess

On a cruiseship bound for Buenos Aires, a wealthy passenger challenges the world chess champion to a match. He accepts with a sneer. He will beat anyone, he says. But only if the stakes are high. Soon, the chess board is surrounded. At first, the challenger crumbles before the mind of the master. But then, a soft-spoken voice from the crowd begins to whisper nervous suggestions. Perfect moves, brilliant predictions. The speaker has not played a game for more than twenty years, he says. He is wholly unknown. But somehow, he is also entirely formidable ...

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The usual last-minute bustle of activity reigned on board the large passenger steamer that was to leave New York for Buenos Aires at midnight. Visitors who had come up from the country to see their friends off were pushing and shoving, telegraph boys with caps tilted sideways on their heads ran through the saloons calling out names, luggage and flowers were being brought aboard, inquisitive children ran up and down the steps, while the band for the deck show played imperturbably on. I was standing on the promenade deck a little way from all this turmoil, talking to an acquaintance, when two or three bright flashlights went off close to us. It seemed that some prominent person was being quickly interviewed by reporters and photographed just before the ship left. My friend glanced that way and smiled. ‘Ah, you have a rare bird on board there. That’s Czentovic.’ And as this information obviously left me looking rather blank, he explained further. ‘Mirko Czentovic, the world chess champion. He’s been doing the rounds of America from the east coast to the west, playing in tournaments, and now he’s off to fresh triumphs in Argentina.’
 
I did in fact remember the name of the young world champion, and even some of the details of his meteoric career. My friend, a more attentive reader of the newspapers than I am, was able to add a whole series of anecdotes. About a year ago, Czentovic had suddenly risen to be ranked with the most experienced masters of the art of chess, men like Alekhine, Capablanca, Tartakower, Lasker and Bogolyubov. Not since the appearance of the seven year-old infant prodigy Rzeschewski at the New York chess tournament of 1922 had the incursion into that famous guild of a complete unknown aroused such general notice. For Czentovic’s intellectual qualities by no means seemed to have marked him out for such a dazzling career. Soon the secret was leaking out that, in private life, this grandmaster of chess couldn’t write a sentence in any language without making spelling mistakes, and as one of his piqued colleagues remarked with irate derision, ‘his ignorance was universal in all fields’. The son of a poor South Slavonian boatman, whose tiny craft had been run down one night by a freight steamer carrying grain, the boy, then twelve, had been taken in after his father’s death by the priest of his remote village out of charity, and by providing extra tuition at home the good Father did his very best to compensate for what the taciturn, stolid, broadbrowed child had failed to learn at the village school.