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Updated: May 12, 2025
I waited for a little and again knocked three times in succession. Tyeglev sat up again and listened. I tapped again. I was lying facing him but he could not see my hand.... I put it behind me under the bedclothes. "Ridel!" cried Tyeglev. I did not answer. "Ridel!" he repeated loudly. "Ridel!" "Eh? What is it?" I said as though just waking up.
What do you want of me?" I turned round quickly. Before me stood Tyeglev with his hands hanging at his sides and with no cap on his head. His face was pale; but his eyes looked animated and bigger than usual. His breathing came in deep, prolonged gasps through his parted lips. "Thank God!" I cried in an outburst of joy, and I gripped him by both hands. "Thank God!
"But how can we find the way in this fog?" "There is a light in our windows, and we will make for it. Come along." "You go ahead," answered Tyeglev. "I will follow you." We set off. We walked for five minutes and our beacon light still did not appear; at last it gleamed before us in two red points. Tyeglev stepped evenly behind me.
"Then come outside." I hurriedly dressed and went out of the hut with Tyeglev. On the side opposite to it there were no houses, nothing but a low hurdle fence broken down in places, beyond which there was a rather sharp slope down to the plain. Everything was still shrouded in mist and one could scarcely see anything twenty paces away. Tyeglev and I went up to the hurdle and stood still.
The brigadier-general, a man of German extraction, used to say of him: "He has punctuality but not precision." With the soldiers, too, Tyeglev had the character of being neither one thing nor the other. He lived modestly, in accordance with his means. He had been left an orphan at nine years old: his father and mother were drowned when they were being ferried across the Oka in the spring floods.
A man really was sitting with his back towards us, awkwardly huddled up under the birch-tree. I hurriedly approached and recognised Tyeglev's great-coat, recognised his figure, his head bowed on his breast. "Tyeglev!" I cried ... but he did not answer. "Tyeglev!" I repeated, and laid my hand on his shoulder.
Can something unexpected have happened to you in Petersburg?" "I found in Petersburg exactly what I expected," answered Tyeglev, without moving from the spot. "That is ... you mean to say ... your friend ... this Masha...." "She has taken her life," Tyeglev answered hurriedly and as it were angrily. "She was buried the day before yesterday. She did not even leave a note for me.
"Oh, if only I had a grandmother to tell me beforehand what cards will win, as in Pushkin's Queen of Spades," cried a lieutenant whose losses had nearly reached three thousand. Tyeglev approached the table in silence, took up a pack, cut it, and saying "the six of diamonds," turned the pack up: the six of diamonds was the bottom card.
I did not want to go back to Petersburg; I sauntered about the neighbouring marshes, killed a brace of snipe and spent the evening with Tyeglev under the shelter of an empty barn where he had, as he expressed it, set up his summer residence.
Through my half-closed eyelids in the whitish light of the night I could distinctly see every movement he made. He turned his face first to the window then to the door. It certainly was difficult to make out where the sound came from: it seemed to float round the room, to glide along the walls. I had accidentally hit upon a kind of sounding board. "Ridel!" cried Tyeglev at last, "Ridel! Ridel!"
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