HE motor-car stood palpitating outside the doors of the Town Hall at Ballygore. Its powerful headlights glared at the crowd which blocked the road in front of it. Beyond the limit of their range, on each side of the car and behind it, the crowd was denser still. Lawrence O'Kevin, bareheaded, descended the steps of the hall accompanied by three gentlemen also bareheaded. The crowd cheered. O'Kevin waved his hand, put on his hat, took it off again and waved it. Then he stepped into the car. The crowd cheered more enthusiastically. The driver, sitting at the steering wheel of the car, blew several warning blasts on his horn. The crowd, refusing to be warned, continued to cheer. O'Kevin stood up.
"God save Ireland," he said.
"And damn the Orangemen," said some one.
The crowd cheered both sentiments with vigour. The driver, who no doubt wanted to get home to bed, threw a note of impatient anger into the hooting of his horn. He started the car and O'Kevin sat down abruptly. That part of the crowd which was in front of the car scattered right and left. The cheering was continued by those whose limbs were safe. O'Kevin leaned forward and waved his hat.
In a few minutes the car was clear of the crowd and clear of the streets of the town. It sped at a high pace along the empty country roads. O'Kevin leaned back and closed his eyes.
"I wish," he murmured, "that it were not absolutely necessary to damn the Orangemen."
Lawrence O'Kevin was a Member of Parliament, and one of the leading figures in the Irish Nationalist Party. All successful politicians are politicians by nature. They are born with a taste for making speeches and it is in them to enjoy intrigue. But most of them belong to one party or the other by mere accident. They would be just as happy, just as effective, if the dice of circumstance had fallen the other way up and they had found themselves members of the opposite party. Lawrence O'Kevin was an exception to this rule. He was a Nationalist, just as he was a politician, by nature. It was impossible to imagine him a Unionist.
Yet even Lawrence O'Kevin was thankful when his speech was over. Ballygore is one of those danger spots on the borders of Protestant Ulster where the numbers of the two parties are very nearly equal. The Nationalists had for nearly a year watched their opponents drilling and arming. They were quite of opinion that it was time for them to do the same. When O'Kevin, the trusted lieutenant of their trusted leader, advised them to do the very thing they wanted to do their enthusiasm was unbounded. Never in the whole course of his life had O'Kevin held a more successful meeting. Yet, when it was all over and the car in which he sat was racing through the cool night air, he leaned back and thanked Heaven.
The fact is that it is not only the round men in the square holes who are discontented with their lot. The fortunate few who, being round, get into round holes are ultimately worried by the want of angles in their lives. A surgeon may have, ought to have, a natural love for cutting out appendices; but if he is kept at it by fate, obliged to cut them out at the rate of a hundred a year for a quarter of a century, he begins to wish that he were something else, a market gardener or an ambassador, anything except a surgeon. O'Kevin had made, on an average, two hundred speeches a year for thirty years, all of them on Home Rule, and he had reached the point of regarding each one as a milestone passed on a somewhat weary road. He might he was fifty-five years of age have to make as many as three thousand more. But he was a philosopher. He knew that each time he spoke reduced the number of speeches before him by one, and that in the end he would certainly reach his last speech.