"Charles L. Harness-The Chessplayers" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

The Chessplayers
by Charles L. Harness
This story copyright 1953 by Charles L. Harness.Reprinted by permission of Linn Prentiss.This copy
was created for Jean Hardy's personal use.All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the
copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


Now please understand this. I'm not saying that all chessplayers are lunatics. But I do claim that
chronic chessplaying affects a man.
Let me tell you about the K Street Chess Club, of which I was once treasurer.
Our membership roll claimed a senator, the leader of a large labor union, the president of the A. & W.
railroad, and a few other big shots. But it seemed the more important they were outside, the rottener
they were as chessplayers.
The senator and the rail magnate didn't know the Ruy Lopez from the Queen's Gambit, so of course
they could only play the other fish, or hang around wistfully watching the games of the Class A players
and wishing that they, too, amounted to something.
The club's champion was Bobby Baker, a little boy in the fourth grade at the Pestalozzi-Borstal
Boarding School. Several of his end game compositions had been published in Chess Review and
Shakhmatny Russkji Zhurnal before he could talk plainly.
Our second best was Pete Summers, a clerk for the A. & W. Railroad. He was the author of two very
famous chess books. One book proved that white can always win, and the other proved that black can
always draw. As you might suspect, the gap separating him from the president of his railroad was
abysmal indeed.
The show position was held by Jim Bradley, a chronic idler whose dues were paid by his wife. The
club's admiration for him was profound.
But experts don't make a club. You have to have some guiding spirit, a fairly good player, with a
knack for organization and a true knowledge of values.
Such a gem we had in our secretary, Nottingham Jones.
It was really my interest in Nottingham that led me to join the K Street Chess Club. I wanted to see if
he was an exception, or whether they were all alike.
After I tell you about their encounter with Zeno, you can judge for yourself.
In his unreal life Nottingham Jones was a statistician in a government bureau. He worked at a desk in a
big room with many other desks, including mine, and he performed his duties blankly and without
conscious effort. Many an afternoon, after the quitting bell had rung and I had strolled over to discuss
club finances with him, he would be astonished to discover that he had already gone to work and had
turned out a creditable stack of forms.
I suppose that it was during these hours of his quasi-existence that the invisible Nottingham conceived
those numerous events that had made him famous as a chess club emcee throughout the United States.
For it was Nottingham who organized the famous American-Soviet cable matches (in which the U.S.
team had been so soundly trounced), refereed numerous U.S. match championships, and launched a
dozen brilliant but impecunious foreign chess masters on exhibition tours in a hundred chess clubs from
New York to Los Angeles.
But the achievements of which he was proudest were his bishop-knight tournaments.
Now the bishop is supposed to be slightly stronger than the knight, and this evaluation has become so
ingrained in chess thinking today that no player will voluntarily exchange a bishop for an enemy knight. he
may squander his life's savings on phony stock, talk back to traffic cops, and forget his wedding