Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/175

 are. They will set up inquisitions and every manner of torture chamber to compel people to refrain from breaking their tethers. But once man has broken any old particular hobble-line, not God Himself can safely knot it together again.

Somers now left off standing on his head in front of the word love, and looking at it calmly, decided he didn't care vastly either way. Harriet had on her dressing-table tray a painted wooden heart, painted red with dots round it, a Black Forest trifle which she had bought in Baden-Baden for a penny. On it was the motto:

That was the motto to have on one's red heart: not Love or Hope or any of those aspiring emotions: "The world belongs to the courageous." To be sure, it was a rather two-edged motto just now for Germany. And Somers was not quite sure that it was the "world" that he wanted.

Yes, it was. Not the tuppenny social world of present mankind: but the genuine world, full of life and eternal creative surprises, including of course destructive surprises: since destruction is part of creation. Somers did want the world. He did want to take it away from all the teeming human ants, human slaves, and all the successful, empy careerists. He wanted little that the present society can give. But the lovely other world that is in spite of the social man of to-day: that he wanted, to clear it, to free it. Freedom! Not for this subnormal slavish humanity of democratic antics. But for the world itself, and the Mutigen.

''Mut! Muth!'' A good word. Better even than courage. Virtue, virtus, manliness. Mut—manliness. Not braggadaccio or insolence. De l'audace, et de l'audace, et encore de l'audace! Danton's word. But it was more than daring. It was Mut, profound manliness, that is not afraid of anything except of being cowardly or barren.

Somers wrote to Kangaroo, and enclosed the red wooden heart, which had a little loop of ribbon so that it could be hung on the wall.