“I’ll tell you....  It has always seemed to me strange that terribly ill as you are you should be here in a steamer where it is so hot and stifling and we are always being tossed up and down, where, in fact, everything threatens you with death; now it is all clear to me....  Yes....  Your doctors put you on the steamer to get rid of you.  They get sick of looking after poor brutes like you....  You don’t pay them anything, they have a bother with you, and you damage their records with your deaths—­so, of course, you are brutes!  It’s not difficult to get rid of you....  All that is necessary is, in the first place, to have no conscience or humanity, and, secondly, to deceive the steamer authorities.  The first condition need hardly be considered, in that respect we are artists; and one can always succeed in the second with a little practice.  In a crowd of four hundred healthy soldiers and sailors half a dozen sick ones are not conspicuous; well, they drove you all on to the steamer, mixed you with the healthy ones, hurriedly counted you over, and in the confusion nothing amiss was noticed, and when the steamer had started they saw that there were paralytics and consumptives in the last stage lying about on the deck....”

Gusev did not understand Pavel Ivanitch; but supposing he was being blamed, he said in self-defence: 

“I lay on the deck because I had not the strength to stand; when we were unloaded from the barge on to the ship I caught a fearful chill.”

“It’s revolting,” Pavel Ivanitch went on.  “The worst of it is they know perfectly well that you can’t last out the long journey, and yet they put you here.  Supposing you get as far as the Indian Ocean, what then?  It’s horrible to think of it....  And that’s their gratitude for your faithful, irreproachable service!”

Pavel Ivanitch’s eyes looked angry; he frowned contemptuously and said, gasping: 

“Those are the people who ought to be plucked in the newspapers till the feathers fly in all directions.”

The two sick soldiers and the sailor were awake and already playing cards.  The sailor was half reclining in his hammock, the soldiers were sitting near him on the floor in the most uncomfortable attitudes.  One of the soldiers had his right arm in a sling, and the hand was swathed up in a regular bundle so that he held his cards under his right arm or in the crook of his elbow while he played with the left.  The ship was rolling heavily.  They could not stand up, nor drink tea, nor take their medicines.

“Were you an officer’s servant?” Pavel Ivanitch asked Gusev.

“Yes, an officer’s servant.”

“My God, my God!” said Pavel Ivanitch, and he shook his head mournfully.  “To tear a man out of his home, drag him twelve thousand miles away, then to drive him into consumption and... and what is it all for, one wonders?  To turn him into a servant for some Captain Kopeikin or midshipman Dirka!  How logical!”