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about to explode and shatter into pieces.
    Apollon Apollonovich Ableukhov suffered from dilatation of the heart.
    All this lasted an instant.
    Apollon Apollonovich, automatically putting on his top hat and pressing a black suede hand to his galloping heart, again devoted himself to his beloved contemplation of cubes, in order to give himself a calm and sensible account of what had taken place.
    Apollon Apollonovich again looked out of the carriage: what he saw now blotted out what had gone before: a wet, slippery prospect; wet, slippery flagstones shining feverishly in the miserable September day!
    The horses stopped.A policeman saluted.Behind the glass of the entrance porch, behind a bearded caryatid that supported the stones of a small balcony, Apollon Apollonovich saw the same spectacle as usual: a heavy-headed bronze mace gleamed there; the dark triangle of the doorman had subsided on an octogenarian shoulder there.The octogenarian doorman was falling asleep over the Stock Exchange Gazette .Thus had he fallen asleep yesterday, and the day before yesterday.Thus had he slept for the past fateful five years 29 … Thus would he sleep for the next five years to come.
    Five years had now passed since Apollon Apollonovich rolled up to the Institution as the junior head of the Institution: over five years had passed since that time!And there had been events: China had been in a state of ferment and Port Arthur had fallen. 30 But the vision of the years is immutable: an octogenarian shoulder, gold braid, a beard.
    The door flew open: the bronze mace banged.Apollon Apollonovich carried his stony gaze into the wide open entrance porch.And the door closed.
    Apollon Apollonovich stood and breathed.
    ‘Your excellency … Please sit down, sir … Look at you, how you’re panting …’
    ‘You’re forever running as though you were a little boy …’
    ‘Please sit down, your excellency: get your breath back …’
    ‘There now, that’s it, sir …’
    ‘Perhaps … a little water?’
    But the face of the distinguished man of state brightened up, became childish, senile; it dissolved entirely in wrinkles:
    ‘But tell me, please: what is the husband of a countess, a grafinya ?’
    ‘A countess, sir?… But which one, may I be allowed to ask?’
    ‘Oh, just any old grafinya .’
    ‘The husband of a grafinya is a grafin , a decanter!’
    ‘Hee-hee-hee, sir …’
    And the heart that was disobedient to the mind trembled and thumped; and because of this, everything all around it was the same and not the same …
    Of Two Poorly Dressed Coursistes … 31
    Among the slowly flowing crowds the stranger was flowing, too; and more precisely, he was flowing away, in complete confusion,from that crossroads where by the stream of people he had been squeezed against the black carriage, from whence had stared at him: a skull, an ear, a top hat.
    That ear and that skull!
    Remembering them, the stranger hurled himself into flight.
    Couple after couple flowed past: threesomes, foursomes flowed past; from each one to the sky rose a smoky pillar of conversation, interweaving, fusing with smoky, contiguously moving pillar; intersecting the pillars of conversation, my stranger caught fragments of them; from those fragments both phrases and sentences formed.
    The gossip of the Nevsky began to plait itself.
    ‘Do you know?’ came from somewhere to the right and expired in the accumulating rumble.
    And then to the surface again came:
    ‘They’re going to …’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Throw …’
    There was a whispering from the rear.
    The stranger with the small black moustache, turning round, saw: a bowler hat, a walking stick, a coat; ears, a moustache and a nose …
    ‘Who at?’
    ‘Who, who,’ came an echoed whisper from afar; and then the dark suit spoke.
    ‘Abl …’
    And, having spoken, the suit moved on.
    ‘Ableukhov?’
    ‘At Ableukhov?’
    But the suit finished what it was saying somewhere over there …
    ‘Abl … oody wish you’d