The pages fluttered and fell. Georgi’s glance caught one of them. Upon it stood, in large, distorted letters: Yoshiwara.
The car stopped at a crossing. Yellow-skinned fellows, in many-coloured embroidered silk jackets, wound themselves, supple as eels, through the twelve-fold strings of waiting cars. One of them swung himself onto the foot-board of the black motor-car in which Georgi sat. For one second the grinning hideousness stared into the young, white, helpless face.
A sheaf of hand-bills were hurled through the window, falling upon Georgi’s knee and before his feet. He bent down mechanically and picked up that for which his fingers were groping.
On these slips, which gave out a penetrating, bitter-sweet, seductive perfume, there stood, in large, bewitched-looking letters, the word: Yoshiwara....
Georgi’s throat was as dry as dust. He moistened his cracked lips with his tongue, which lay heavy and as though parched in his mouth.
A voice had said to him: “You will find more than enough money in my pockets....”
Enough money ... what for? To clutch and drag near this city—this mighty, heavenly, hellish city; to embrace her with both arms, both legs, in the impotence of mastering her; to despair, to throw oneself into her—take me!—take me!—To feel the filled bowl at one’s lips—gulping, gulping—not drawing breath, the brim of the bowl set fast between the teeth—eternal, eternal insatiability, competing with the eternal, eternal overflow, overpouring of the bowl of intoxication....
Ah—Metropolis!... Metropolis!...
“More than enough money....”
A strange sound came from Georgi’s throat, and there was something in it of the throat-rattle of a man who knows he is dreaming and wants to awake, and something of the guttural sound of the beast of prey when it scents blood. His hand did not let go of the wad of banknotes for the second time. It screwed it up in burning convulsive fingers.