One was tempted to see the same unrest and sleeplessness in all nature, from the night darkness to the iron slabs, the crosses on the tombs and the trees under which the people were moving to and fro.  But nowhere was the excitement and restlessness so marked as in the church.  An unceasing struggle was going on in the entrance between the inflowing stream and the outflowing stream.  Some were going in, others going out and soon coming back again to stand still for a little and begin moving again.  People were scurrying from place to place, lounging about as though they were looking for something.  The stream flowed from the entrance all round the church, disturbing even the front rows, where persons of weight and dignity were standing.  There could be no thought of concentrated prayer.  There were no prayers at all, but a sort of continuous, childishly irresponsible joy, seeking a pretext to break out and vent itself in some movement, even in senseless jostling and shoving.

The same unaccustomed movement is striking in the Easter service itself.  The altar gates are flung wide open, thick clouds of incense float in the air near the candelabra; wherever one looks there are lights, the gleam and splutter of candles. . . .  There is no reading; restless and lighthearted singing goes on to the end without ceasing.  After each hymn the clergy change their vestments and come out to burn the incense, which is repeated every ten minutes.

I had no sooner taken a place, when a wave rushed from in front and forced me back.  A tall thick-set deacon walked before me with a long red candle; the grey-headed archimandrite in his golden mitre hurried after him with the censer.  When they had vanished from sight the crowd squeezed me back to my former position.  But ten minutes had not passed before a new wave burst on me, and again the deacon appeared.  This time he was followed by the Father Sub-Prior, the man who, as Ieronim had told me, was writing the history of the monastery.

As I mingled with the crowd and caught the infection of the universal joyful excitement, I felt unbearably sore on Ieronim’s account.  Why did they not send someone to relieve him?  Why could not someone of less feeling and less susceptibility go on the ferry?  ’Lift up thine eyes, O Sion, and look around,’ they sang in the choir, ’for thy children have come to thee as to a beacon of divine light from north and south, and from east and from the sea. . . .’

I looked at the faces; they all had a lively expression of triumph, but not one was listening to what was being sung and taking it in, and not one was ‘holding his breath.’  Why was not Ieronim released?  I could fancy Ieronim standing meekly somewhere by the wall, bending forward and hungrily drinking in the beauty of the holy phrase.  All this that glided by the ears of the people standing by me he would have eagerly drunk in with his delicately sensitive soul, and would have been spell-bound to ecstasy, to holding his breath, and there would not have been a man happier than he in all the church.  Now he was plying to and fro over the dark river and grieving for his dead friend and brother.