Henry passed the intervening ground and climbed the steps.  Under the pillars before the heavy, swinging doors were two rows of beggars; they were dirtier, more touzled and tangled, fiercer and more ironically falsely submissive than any beggars that, he had ever seen.  He described one fellow to me, a fierce brigand with a high black hat of feathers, a soiled Cossack coat and tall dirty red leather boots; his eyes were fires, Henry said.  At any rate that is what Henry liked to think they were.  There was a woman with no legs and a man with neither nose nor ears.  I am sure that they watched Henry with supplicating hostility.  He entered the church and was instantly swallowed up by a vast multitude.

He described to me afterwards that it was as though he had been pushed (by the evil, eager fingers of the beggars no doubt) into deep water.  He rose with a gasp, and was first conscious of a strange smell of dirt and tallow and something that he did not know, but was afterwards to recognise as the scent of sunflower seed.  He was pushed upon, pressed and pulled, fingered and crushed.  He did not mind—­he was glad—­this was what he wanted.  He looked about him and found that he and all the people round him were swimming in a hazy golden mist flung into the air from the thousands of lighted candles that danced in the breeze blowing through the building.  The whole vast shining floor was covered with peasants, pressed, packed together.  Peasants, men and women—­he did not see a single member of the middle-class.  In front of him under the altar there was a blaze of light, and figures moved in the blaze uncertainly, indistinctly.  Now and then a sudden quiver passed across the throng, as wind blows through the corn.  Here and there men and women knelt, but for the most part they stood steadfast, motionless, staring in front of them.  He looked at them and discovered that they had the faces of children—­simple, trustful, unintelligent, unhumorous children,—­and eyes, always kindlier than any he had ever seen in other human beings.  They stood there gravely, with no signs of religious fervour, with no marks of impatience or weariness and also with no evidence of any especial interest in what was occurring.  It might have been a vast concourse of sleep-walkers.

He saw that three soldiers near to him were holding hands....

From the lighted altars came the echoing whisper of a monotonous chant.  The sound rose and fell, scarcely a voice, scarcely an appeal, something rising from the place itself and sinking back into it again without human agency.

After a time he saw a strange movement that at first he could not understand.  Then watching, he found that unlit candles were being passed from line to line, one man leaning forward and tapping the man in front of him with the candle, the man in front passing it, in his turn, forward, and so on until at last it reached the altar where it was lighted and fastened into its sconce.  This tapping with the candles happened incessantly throughout the vast crowd.  Henry himself was tapped, and felt suddenly as though he had been admitted a member of some secret society.  He felt the tap again and again, and soon he seemed to be hypnotised by the low chant at the altar and the motionless silent crowd and the dim golden mist.  He stood, not thinking, not living, away, away, questioning nothing, wanting nothing....