"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 Marcu