Knock, Knock, Knock and Other Stories eBook

go in for tricks,” Tyeglev answered drily and walked into the other room.  How it happened that he guessed the card right, I can’t pretend to explain:  but I saw it with my own eyes.  Many of the players present tried to do the same—­and not one of them succeeded:  one or two did guess one card but never two in succession.  And Tyeglev had guessed three!  This incident strengthened still further his reputation as a mysterious, fatal character.  It has often occurred to me since that if he had not succeeded in the trick with the cards, there is no knowing what turn it would have taken and how he would have looked at himself; but this unexpected success clinched the matter.

IV

It may well be understood that Tyeglev clutched at this reputation.  It gave him a special significance, a special colour ...

“Cela le posait,” as the French express it—­and with his limited intelligence, scanty education and immense vanity, such a reputation just suited him.  It was difficult to acquire it but to keep it up cost nothing:  he had only to remain silent and hold himself aloof.  But it was not owing to this reputation that I made friends with Tyeglev and, I may say, grew fond of him.  I liked him in the first place because I was rather an unsociable creature myself—­and saw in him one of my own sort, and secondly, because he was a very good-natured fellow and in reality, very simple-hearted.  He aroused in me a feeling of something like compassion; it seemed to me that apart from his affected “fatality,” he really was weighed down by a tragic fate which he did not himself suspect.  I need hardly say I did not express this feeling to him:  could anything be more insulting to a “fatal” hero than to be an object of pity?  And Tyeglev, on his side, was well-disposed to me; with me he felt at ease, with me he used to talk—­in my presence he ventured to leave the strange pedestal on which he had been placed either by his own efforts or by chance.  Agonisingly, morbidly vain as he was, yet he was probably aware in the depths of his soul that there was nothing to justify his vanity, and that others might perhaps look down on him ... but I, a boy of nineteen, put no constraint on him; the dread of saying something stupid, inappropriate, did not oppress his ever-apprehensive heart in my presence.  He sometimes even chattered freely; and well it was for him that no one heard his chatter except me!  His reputation would not have lasted long.  He not only knew very little, but read hardly anything and confined himself to picking up stories and anecdotes of a certain kind.  He believed in presentiments, predictions, omens, meetings, lucky and unlucky days, in the persecution and benevolence of destiny, in the mysterious significance of life, in fact.  He even believed in certain “climacteric” years which someone had mentioned in his presence and the meaning of which he did not himself very well understand.  “Fatal” men of the true stamp ought not to betray such beliefs:  they ought to inspire them in others....  But I was the only one who knew Tyeglev on that side.