The dark shadows floated off a little. But the hellish drinking dens remained. For long years the Orthodox folk caroused here with a ghost: a mongrel race arrived from the islands -- neither human beings nor shadows, -- settling on the boundary between two worlds that were alien to each other.
Apollon Apollonovich did not like the islands: the population there was industrial, coarse; a human swarm of many thousands plodded its way in the mornings to the many-chimneyed factories; and now he knew that the Browning circulated there; and a few other things as well. Apollon Apollonovich thought: the inhabitants of the islands are numbered among the population of the Russian Empire; the general census has been introduced among them, too, they have numbered houses, police stations, fiscal institutions, the island resident is a lawyer, a writer, a worker, a police clerk; he considers himself a citizen of Petersburg, but he, a denizen of chaos, threatens the capital of the Empire in a gathering cloud . . .
Apollon Apollonovich did not want to reflect any further: the restless islands must be crushed, crushed! They must be riveted to the ground with the iron of the enormous bridge and transfixed in every direction by the arrows of the prospects . . .
And now, as he looked pensively into that boundlessness of mists, the man of state suddenly expanded out of the black cube in all directions and soared above it; and he desired that the carriage should fly forward, that the prospects should fly towards him -- prospect after prospect, that the whole spherical surface of the planet should be gripped by the blackish-grey cubes of the houses as by serpentine coils; that the whole of the earth squeezed by prospects should intersect the immensity in linear cosmic flight with a rectilinear law, that the mesh of parallel prospects, intersected by a mesh of prospects, should expand into the abysses of outer space with the planes of squares and cubes: one square per man-in-the-street, that, that . . .
After the line of all the symmetries it was the figure of the square that brought him the most calm.
He was in the habit of giving himself up for long periods of time to the insouciant contemplation of: pyramids, triangles, parallelepipeds, cubes, trapezoids. He was seized by anxiety only when he contemplated the truncated cone.
As for the zigzag line, he could not endure it.
Here, in the carriage, Apollon Apollonovich took pleasure for a long time without thought in the quadrangular walls, residing at the centre of the black, perfect and satin-covered cube: Apollon Apollonovich had been born for solitary confinement; only a love for the planimetry of state clothed him in the polyhedrality of a responsible post.
. . .
There is an infinity of prospects racing in infinity with an infinity of intersecting shadows racing into infinity. All Petersburg is the infinity of a prospect raised to the power of n.
While beyond Petersburg there is -- nothing.
O Russian people, Russian people!
Do not admit the crowds of flickering shadows from the island: stealthily those shadows penetrate into your corporeal abodes; they penetrate from there into the nooks and crannies of your souls: you become the shadows of the wreathed, flying mists: those mists have been flying from time immemorial out of the end of the earth; out of the leaden spaces of the wave-seething Baltic; into the fog from time immemorial the crushing mouths of the cannons have stared.
At twelve o'clock, in accordance with tradition, a hollow cannon shot solemnly filled Saint Petersburg, capital of the Russian Empire: all the mists were broken and all the shadows were scattered.
Only my shadow -- the elusive young man -- was not shaken and was not diffused by the shot, completing his run to the Neva without hindrance. Suddenly my stranger's sensitive ear heard behind his back an ecstatic whisper:
'It's the Elusive One!'
'Look -- it's the Elusive One!'
'How brave he is! . . .'
And when, unmasked, he turned his island face, he saw steadily fixed on him the little eyes of two poorly dressed coursistes . . .
. . .
'No, you won't understand me!'
'I will: hm-hm-hm -- you definitely don't have enough handkerchiefs.'
'What?'
'But your cold! . . . And the wild beast -- hm-hm-hm -- won't go away?'
'Well, where is there for him to . . .'
'Well then, you should draw a salary . . .'
'A salary! I don't work for a salary: I'm an artist, do you understand -- an artist!'
'Of a sort . . .'
'What?'
'Nothing: I'm curing myself with a tallow candle.'
The small figure took out its snot-covered handkerchief and again made a squelching sound with its nose.
'But I'm talking about the deed! Make sure you tell them that Nikolai Apollonovich has given a promise . . .'
'A tallow candle is a marvelous remedy for a cold . . .'
'Tell them all that you heard it from me: this deed has been set . . .'
'In the evening you smear it on your nostrils, in the morning you're as right as rain . . .'
'The deed has been set, I tell you again, like the mech . . .'
'Your nose is cleared, you breathe freely . . .'
'Like the mechanism of a clock!'
'Eh?'
'The mechanism, the devil take it, of a clock.'
'My ear's blocked: I can't hear.'
'The-me-chan-ism-of-a . . .'
'Achoo! . . .'
Anything to add? Any corrections to make?
