Chess has this in common with making poetry, that the desire for
it comes upon the amateur in gusts. It is very easy for him not
to make poetry; sometimes he may go for months without writing a
line of it. But when once he is delivered of an ode, then the
desire to write another ode is strong upon him. A sudden passion
for rhyme masters him, and must work itself out. It will be all
right in a few weeks; he will go back to prose or bills-of-
parcels or whatever is his natural method of expressing himself,
none the worse for his adventure. But he will have gained this
knowledge for his future guidance--that poems never come singly.
Every two or three years I discover the game of chess. In normal
times when a man says to me, "Do you play chess?" I answer
coldly, "Well, I know the moves." "Would you like a game?" he
asks, and I say, "I don't think I will, thanks very much. I
hardly ever play." And there the business ends. But once in two
years, or it may be three, circumstances are too strong for me. I
meet a man so keen or a situation so dull that politeness or
boredom leads me to accept. The board is produced, I remind
myself that the queen stands on a square of her own colour, and
that the knight goes next to the castle; I push forward the
king's pawn two squares, and we are off. Yes, we are off; but not
for one game only. For a month at least I shall dream of chess at
night and make excuses to play it in the day. For a month chess
will be even more to me than golf or billiards--games which I
adore because I am so bad at them. For a month, starting from
yesterday when I was inveigled into a game, you must regard me,
please, as a chess maniac.
Among small boys with no head for the game I should probably be
described as a clever player. If my opponent only learnt
yesterday, and is still a little doubtful as to what a knight can
do, I know one or two rather good tricks for removing his queen.
My subtlest stroke is to wait until Her Majesty is in front of
the king, and then to place my castle in front of her, with a
pawn in support. Sometimes I forget the pawn and he takes my
castle, in which case I try to look as if the loss of my castle
was the one necessary preliminary to my plan of campaign, and
that now we were off. When he is busy on one side of the board, I
work a knight up on the other, and threaten two of his pieces
simultaneously. To the extreme novice I must seem rather
resourceful.
But then I am an old hand at the game. My career dates from--
well, years ago when I won my house championship at school. This
championship may have carried a belt with it; I have forgotten.
But there was certainly a prize--a prize of five solid shillings,
supposing the treasurer had managed to collect the subscriptions.
In the year when I won it I was also treasurer. I assure you that
the quickness and skill necessary for winning the competition
were as nothing to that necessary for collecting the money. If
any pride remains to me over that affair, if my name is written
in letters of fire in the annals of our house chess club, it is
because I actually obtained the five shillings.
After this the game did not trouble me for some time. But there
came a day when a friend and I lunched at a restaurant in which
chess-boards formed as permanent a part the furniture of the
dining tables as the salt and mustard. Partly in joke, because it
seemed to be the etiquette of the building, we started a game. We
stayed there two hours ... and the fever remained with me for two
months. Another year or so of normal development followed. Then I
caught influenza and spent dull days in bed. Nothing can be worse
for an influenza victim than chess, but I suppose my warders did
not realize how much I suffered under the game. Anyhow, I played
it all day and dreamed of it all night--a riot of games in which
all the people I knew moved diagonally and up and down, took each
other, and became queens.
And now I have played again, and am once more an enthusiast. You
will agree with me, will you not, that it is a splendid game?
People mock at it. They say that it is not such good exercise as
cricket or golf. How wrong they are. That it brings the same
muscles into play as does cricket I do not claim for it. Each
game develops a different set of sinews; but what chess-player
who has sat with an extended forefinger on the head of his queen
for five minutes, before observing the enemy's bishop in the
distance and bringing back his piece to safety--what chess-
player, I say, will deny that the muscles of the hand ridge up
like lumps of iron after a month at the best of games? What
chess-player who has stretched his arm out in order to open with
the Ruy Lopez gambit, who has then withdrawn it as the
possibilities of the Don Quixote occur to him, and who has
finally, after another forward and backward movement, decided to
rely upon the bishop's declined pawn--what chess-player, I ask,
will not affirm that the biceps are elevated by this noblest of
pastimes? And, finally, what chess-player, who in making too
eagerly the crowning move, has upset with his elbow the victims
of the preliminary skirmishing, so that they roll upon the floor-
-what chess-player, who has to lean down and pick them up, will
not be the better for the strain upon his diaphragm? No; say what
you will against chess, but do not mock at it for its lack of
exercise.
Yet there is this against it. The courtesies of the game are few.
I think that this must be why the passion for it leaves me after
a month. When at cricket you are bowled first ball, the
wicketkeeper can comfort you by murmuring that the light is bad;
when at tennis your opponent forces for the dedans and strikes
you heavily under the eye, he can shout, "Sorry!" when at golf
you reach a bunker in 4 and take 3 to get out, your partner can
endear himself by saying, "Hard luck"; but at chess everything
that the enemy does to you is deliberate. He cannot say, "Sorry!"
as he takes your knight; he does not call it hard luck when your
king is surrounded by vultures eager for his death; and though it
would be kindly in him to attribute to the bad light the fact
that you never noticed his castle leaning against your queen, yet
it would be quite against the etiquette of the game.
Indeed, it is impossible to win gracefully at chess. No man yet
has said "Mate!" in a voice which failed to sound to his opponent
bitter, boastful, and malicious. It is the tone of that voice
which, after a month, I find it impossible any longer to stand.