“Shall we have a game of chess?” said the Master, looking up as if he
had just been awakened. There was nothing feigned about this air of
abstraction.
A mere sixteen plays scarcely demanded a recount, and a player has the
whole of the board constantly in his head, when he is eating and even when
he is sleeping. Perhaps it was a sign of dedication and a concern for
precision that the Master all the same insisted on replaying each of the
stones, and would not be satisfied until he had done so. Perhaps too it had
in it a certain element of circumspection. One saw in the curious
mannerism the loneliness of an old man who has not had too happy a life.
At the fifth session five days later, July 21, there were twenty-two plays,
from White 44 to the sealed Black 65.
“How much time did I use?” the Master asked the girl.
“An hour and twenty minutes.”
“That much?” He seemed incredulous. The total time he had used for his
eleven plays was six minutes fewer than Otaké had used for Black 59
alone. Yet he seemed to think he had played more rapidly.
“It does seem unlikely that you used so much time, sir,” said Otaké.
“You were playing at a fearful rate.”
the Master asked the girl.
“Sixteen minutes.”
“Twenty minutes.”
“The link took you longer,” said Otaké.
“White 58 that would be?” The girl looked at her records. “Thirty-five
minutes.”
