XV.

Soon after my return from Baku, I was transferred to Warsaw, in order to take part in the May-day celebrations of 1905--these May-day celebrations taking place according to the calendar of non-Russian countries.

The war, the unceasing extensive strikes and disturbances, had resulted everywhere in giving rise to horrible misery, which was further increased by the political crisis and by the arrest of all branches of industry.

All the misery of which I had always dreamed I now saw unceasingly around me. It might be believed that at length my desires would have obtained satisfaction! But this was not so. In the same degree as that with which the poverty around me increased did my sensibility, too, become blunted; I became accustomed to its appearance; I regarded it as an everyday occurrence, as something easily comprehensible.

=Somewhat= more did I love and honour humanity on account of this misery; but not to the extent of something beyond force, something “superhuman,” which would have been necessary for my complete satisfaction. Perhaps in Baku I should have experienced this superhuman feeling, had it not been that at the decisive moment my body gave way under the strain. Was that, perhaps, prearranged by Nature? Has Nature imposed these limits upon an individual, in order to prevent him from raising himself above the human standard?

Can it be that the state into which I fell at Baku resembled a “syncope of the soul,” which ensued when my psychical state began to verge upon the superhuman, in consequence of the torments around me, just as bodily syncope renders us unconscious when physical pain exceeds the limits of human capacity?

These questions now began to occupy me. I could only attain certainty by means of experiment; and I must obtain certainty, even if the half of humanity had to be sacrificed, as one sacrifices a rabbit in an experiment.

Impatiently I awaited the first of May.... Perhaps that day would bring me a solution of the riddle!... The workmen were still undecided: should they demonstrate or not?... I began to urge them =in favour of= the demonstration; =my= reason is easy to understand....

It was unquestionably one of the largest demonstrations that Warsaw had ever witnessed. In the narrow streets there was packed an innumerable crowd. Suddenly from all sides the soldiers charged the demonstration.... A frightful panic--such as I have never before seen--seized the crowd. Resistance was not to be thought of--it was a _sauve qui peut_!

In mad fear of death, every one began to scream, and to seek refuge in the houses.... At the doors of the houses there ensued a frightful pressure. Many were thrown to the ground; these were trodden to pulp. On the ground-floor the windows were broken in, and people crawled through them into the houses. Meanwhile, the Cossacks were raging up and down, cutting people down with their sabres. There were deafening screams of fear, and with these and with the groans of the wounded there mingled the bestial “Süiy” of the Cossacks, so as to produce a nerve-lacerating concert of hell. And around one could see the unnaturally dilated pupils, the widely opened eyes, and the faces distracted with anxiety, of those who were seeking safety in flight.

The same excitement had seized on me also; with a wildly beating heart, and an unbearably distressing feeling of contracture in the loins, which produced in my entire organism a kind of “anxious ecstasy,” I began to hope.... But it would not come....