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But man alive! I cried. What in the name of tornadoes do you
want?
I want to fight, said he. The earth has grown too grey and
peaceful. Life is anaemic. We need colourgood red splashes of
itgood wholesome bloodshed.
Said I, All you have to do is to go into a Berlin cafe and pull
the noses of all the lieutenants you see there. In that way
you'll get as much gore as your heart could desire.
By Jove! said he, springing to his feet. What a cause for a
man to devote his life tothe extermination of Prussian
lieutenants!
I leaned back in my armchairit was after dinnerand smiled at
his vehemence. The ordinary man does not leap about like that
during digestion.
You would have been happy as an Uscoque, said I. (I have just
finished the prim narrative.)
What's that? he asked. I told him.
The interesting thing about the Uscoques, I added, is that
they were a Cooperative Pirate Society of the sixteenth century,
in which priests and monks and greengrocers and women and
childrenthe general public, in fact, of Sengatook shares and
were paid dividends. They were also a religious people, and the
setting out of the pirate fleet at the festivals of Easter and
Christmas was attended by ecclesiastical ceremony. Then they
scoured the high seas, captured argosies, murdered the crews
their only weapons were hatchets and daggers and arquebuses
landed on undefended shores, ravaged villages and carried off
comely maidens to replenish their stock of womenkind at home.
They must have been a live lot of people.
What a secondhand old brigand you are, cried Pasquale, who
during my speech had been examining the carpet by the side of his
chair.
I laughed. Hasn't a phase of the duality of our nature ever
struck you? We have a primary or everyday naturea thing of
habit, tradition, circumstance; and we also have a secondary
nature which clamours for various sensations and is quite
contented with vicarious gratification. There are delicately
fibred novelists who satisfy a sort of secondary Berserkism by
writing books whose pages reek with bloodshed. The most placid,
benevolent, goldspectacled paterfamilias I know, a man who
thinks it cruel to eat live oysters, has a curious passion for
crime and gratifies it by turning his study into a _musee
maccabre_ of murderers' relics. From the thumbjoint of a
notorious criminal he can savour exquisitely morbid emotions,
while the bloodstains on an assassin's knife fill him with the
delicious lust of slaughter. In the same way predestined
spinsters obtain vicarious enjoyment of the tender passion by
reading highly coloured lovestories.
Just as that philosophical old stick, Sir Marcus Ordeyne, dus

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