“I want to fight,” said he. “The earth has grown too grey and peaceful. Life is anaemic. We need colour—good red splashes of it—good 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 to—the extermination of Prussian lieutenants!”
I leaned back in my arm-chair—it was after dinner—and 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 Co-operative Pirate Society of the sixteenth century, in which priests and monks and greengrocers and women and children—the general public, in fact, of Senga—took 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 second-hand 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 nature—a 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, gold-spectacled 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 thumb-joint of a notorious criminal he can savour exquisitely morbid emotions, while the blood-stains 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 love-stories.”
“Just as that philosophical old stick, Sir Marcus Ordeyne, dus from this sort of thing,” said Pasquale.