Tyeglev’s suicide did not surprise his comrades
very much. I have told you already that, according
to their ideas, as a “fatal” man he was
bound to do something extraordinary, though perhaps
they had not expected that from him. In the letter
to the colonel he asked him, in the first place, to
have the name of Ilya Tyeglev removed from the list
of officers, as he had died by his own act, adding
that in his cash-box there would be found more than
sufficient money to pay his debts,—and,
secondly, to forward to the important personage at
that time commanding the whole corps of guards, an
unsealed letter which was in the same envelope.
This second letter, of course, we all read; some of
us took a copy of it. Tyeglev had evidently taken
pains over the composition of this letter.
“You know, Your Excellency” (so I remember
the letter began), “you are so stern and severe
over the slightest negligence in uniform when a pale,
trembling officer presents himself before you; and
here am I now going to meet our universal, righteous,
incorruptible Judge, the Supreme Being, the Being
of infinitely greater consequence even than Your Excellency,
and I am going to meet him in undress, in my great-coat,
and even without a cravat round my neck.”
Oh, what a painful and unpleasant impression that
phrase made upon me, with every word, every letter
of it, carefully written in the dead man’s childish
handwriting! Was it worth while, I asked myself,
to invent such rubbish at such a moment? But
Tyeglev had evidently been pleased with the phrase:
he had made use in it of the accumulation of epithets
and amplifications a la Marlinsky, at that time
in fashion. Further on he had alluded to destiny,
to persecution, to his vocation which had remained
unfulfilled, to a mystery which he would bear with
him to the grave, to people who had not cared to understand
him; he had even quoted lines from some poet who had
said of the crowd that it wore life “like a
dog-collar” and clung to vice “like a
burdock”—and it was not free from
mistakes in spelling. To tell the truth, this
last letter of poor Tyeglev was somewhat vulgar; and
I can fancy the contemptuous surprise of the great
personage to whom it was addressed—I can
imagine the tone in which he would pronounce “a
worthless officer! ill weeds are cleared out of the
field!”
Only at the very end of the letter there was a sincere
note from Tyeglev’s heart. “Ah, Your
Excellency,” he concluded his epistle, “I
am an orphan, I had no one to love me as a child—and
all held aloof from me ... and I myself destroyed
the only heart that gave itself to me!”
Semyon found in the pocket of Tyeglev’s great-coat
a little album from which his master was never separated.
But almost all the pages had been torn out; only one
was left on which there was the following calculation:
