I shall die of suffocation in a moment.'
Like soda-water from a bottle the crowd burst swirling out of the main doors. Hats fell off, people groaned with relief, crossed themselves.
Through the side door, where two panes of glass were broken in the crush, came the religious procession, silver and gold, the priests breathless and confused, followed by the choir.
Flashes of gold among the black vestments, mitres bobbed, sacred banners were held low to pass under the doorway, then straightened and floated on upright.
There was a heavy frost, a day when smoke rose slowly and heavily above the City.
The cathedral courtyard rang to the ceaseless stamp of thousands of feet.
Frosty clouds of breath swayed in the freezing air and rose up towards the belfry.
The great bell of St Sophia boomed out from the tallest bell-tower, trying to drown the awful, shrieking confusion.
The smaller bells tinkled away at random, dissonant and tuneless, as though Satan had climbed into the belfry and the devil in a cassock was amusing himself by raising bedlam.
Through the black slats of the multi-storied belfry, which had once warned of the coming of the slant-eyed Tartars, the smaller bells could be seen swinging and yelping like mad dogs on a chain.
The frost crunched and steamed.
Shocked by noise and cold, the black mob poured across the cathedral courtyard.
In spite of the cruel frost, mendicant friars with bared heads, some bald as ripe pumpkins, some fringed with sparse orange-colored hair, were already sitting cross-legged in a row along the stone-flagged pathway leading to the main entrance of the old belfry of St Sophia and were chanting in a nasal whine.
Blind ballad-singers droned their eerie song about the Last Judgment, their tattered peaked caps lying upwards to catch the sparse harvest of greasy rouble bills and battered coppers.
Oh, that day, that dreadful day, When the end of the world will come.
The judgment day . . .
The terrible heart-rending sounds floated up from the crunching, frosty ground, wrenched whining from these yellow-toothed old instruments with their palsied, crooked limbs.
'Oh my brethren, oh my sisters, have mercy on my poverty, for the love of Christ, and give alms.'
'Run on to the square and keep a place, Fedosei Petrovich, or we'll be late.'
'There's going to be an open-air service.'
'Procession . . .'
'They're going to pray for victory for the revolutionary people's army of the Ukraine.'
'What victory?
They've already won.'
'And they'll win again!'
'There's going to be a campaign.'
'Where to?'
'To Moscow.'
'Which Moscow?'
'The usual.'
'They'll never make it.'
'What did you say?
Say that again!
Hey, lads, listen to what this Russian's saying!'
'I didn't say anything!'
'Arrest him! Stop, thief!'
'Run through that gateway, Marusya, otherwise we'll never get through this crowd.
They say Petlyura's in the square.
Let's go and see him.'
'You fool, Petlyura's in the cathedral.'
'Fool yourself.
They say he's riding on a white horse.'
'Hurrah for Petlyura!
Hurrah for the Ukrainian People's Republic!'
Bong . . . bong . . . bong . . . tinkle - clang-clang . . . Bong-clang-bong . . . raged the bells.
'Have pity on an orphan, Christian people, good people ...
A blind man ...
A poor man . . .'
Dressed in black, his hindquarters encased in leather like a broken beetle, a legless man wriggled between the legs of the crowd, clutching at the trampled snow with his sleeves to pull himself along.
Crippled beggars displayed the sores on their bruised shins, shook their heads as though from tic douloureux or paralysis, rolled the whites of their eyes pretending to be blind.