Page:Kangaroo, 1923.pdf/176

 "Dear Kangaroo—I send you my red heart (never mind that it is wood, the wood once lived and was the tree of life) with its motto. I hope you will accept it, after all my annoying behaviour. It is not the love, but the Mut that I believe in, and join you in. Love may be an ingredient in Muth, so you have it all your own way. Anyhow, I send you my red motto-heart, and if you don't want it you can send it back—I will be your follower, in reverence for your virtue—Virtus. And you may command me."

The following day came the answer, in Kangaroo's difficult scrawl:

"Dear Lovat—Love is in your name, notwithstanding. I accept the red heart gladly, and when I win, I will wear it for my Order of Merit, pinned on my swelling chest.

"But you are the one person in the world I can never command. I knew it would be so. Yet I am unspeakably glad to have your approval, and perhaps your allegiance.

"Come and see me as soon as it is your wish to do so: I won't invite you, lest worse befall me. For you are either a terrible disappointment to me, or a great blessing in store. I wait for you."

Somers also wrote to Jack, to ask him to come down with Victoria for the week-end. But Jack replied that he couldn't get away this week-end, there was so much doing. Somers then invited him for the following one.

The newspapers were at this time full of the pending strike of coal-miners and shearers: that is, the Australian papers. The European papers were in a terrific stew about finance, and the German debt, and the more imposing Allied debt to America. Bolshevism, Communism, Labour, had all sunk into a sort of insignificance. The voice of mankind was against them for the time being, not now in hate and fear, as previously, but in a kind of bitter contempt: the kind of feeling one has when one has accepted a glib individual as a serious and remarkable man, only to find that he is a stupid vulgarian. Communism was a bubble that would never even float free and iridescent from the nasty pipe of the theorist.

What then? Nothing evident. There came dreary and fatuous letters from friends in England, refined young men of the upper middle-class writing with a guarded kind of friendliness, gentle and sweet, of course, but as dozy as