O'Hara

“ We have lost nothing that we had. We retain the privilege of death."
"You believe that, O'Hara?"
"I am certain of it. I have the means here," he said, tapping his jacket.
"But you haven't the will. That is the trouble now, O'Hara. This thirst of yours to know what happens next is like a disease. Your hand becomes more reluctant each time you stay it, and now that you have seen the Father, what else is there? There are no more wonders. Why do you wait? Let me tell you, O'Hara—"
"Nedra, you are obsessed with dying. Is there no strength in learning to endure?" ”

“ He wheeled Red Beauty suddenly round. A surly-looking postboy, with eyes well-nigh as furtive as those of his recent road acquaintance, pulled the horses to a standstill.
"By my noble father's thirst, whom have we here?" cried O'Hara.
The clamour in the chaise was succeeded by a hush. Then, "Gracious!" rose a voice, quavering in terror, "is this another of them?" Upon which, the shrill accents which O'Hara seemed to have recognised cut in, acid: "Get out your pistals, paltroon. A carse on my good nature—that I should have ever have cansarted with a City dag! ”

“ As they turned, facing each other in the dark, O'Hara was conscious that the number of flambeaux above him had increased and were inching forward, and very dimly now he could detect the outlines of their parka-covered heads. The game was approaching a climax.
It came with a rush. His opponent leaped suddenly, swinging the carved club straight for O'Hara's head, a blow that would have crushed his skull had it struck home, but he ducked beneath its arc, coming up under the descending arm. He grabbed it, whirled and threw his heavy shoulder up, sending his opponent flying through the air. ”

“ In that faint sound of crackling, as he stood aside to listen and to watch, O'Hara knew a form of the eternal Voice of Ages. There was no flame, but it seemed to him that all his inner being passed in fiery heat outwards towards its source.⁠ ⁠... He saw the little patch of dried-up heather sink to the level of the black surface all about it⁠—a sifted pile of delicate, pale-blue ashes. The tiny spiral vanished; he watched it disappear, winding upwards out of sight in a little ghostly trail of beauty. So small and soft and simple was this wonder of the world. ”

“ The screen above the dais now glowed. And when the brilliant light adjusted into patterns, O'Hara saw the glittering corridor outside the Guild, the hall of the Sons at Emporia. The shambling naked tens of thousands of the masses passed before his eyes, as aimless as he'd seen them when he had been there, the women with their babies in their arms, the nude and hairless apelike men, feeding by thousands at the photosynthetron troughs, sleeping by thousands in the wide-bunked slumber halls—a mass of life as purposeless as maggots, living and devouring. ”

“ There is work for you. While you were sleeping with your woman, I have considered a new concept for the Americas—interesting! The first development in a hundred years, O'Hara, and so delightfully simple that I cannot understand why I did not discover it before. You've seen what has happened to my people?"
"The Degraded?" O'Hara answered. "And the Sons?"
The Father's voice was silken. "Are there none beyond the Curtain who would change places with those you describe as the Degraded? Are there none in your world, O'Hara, as deserving of that ungracious term?" ”

“ O'Hara laughed and obeyed, watching my lord's close scrutiny of his countenance with some surprise.
"Interesting pallor, my dear friend, interesting pallor. Nevertheless, I am glad that Jim is on his way." He met O'Hara's eyes as he looked up, and his lips quivered irrepressibly.
"You think me very vain, Miles?"
"Is it a pose of yours, John? Is it Sir Anthony Ferndale, Bart?"
"No. I believe it is myself. You see, when one has but one's self to live for and think for—one makes the most of one's self! Hence my vanity. Take the mirror away, please—the sight of my countenance offends me!" ”

“ The bottom of the pit was indeed rising, lifting O'Hara and Nedra toward the level upon which stood the reed-thin figure of an aged man, a wisp of a man in robes of shimmering and overlaid transparent cloth, a man with scattered hair no longer white but yellowish as parchment is, the beaked and collapsed face of a prophet, toothless, the pallid mouth moving slowly in the sparse, blanched beard, but the eyes young and large and blazingly bright, their blue made darker by the darkness of their sockets, amazing eyes in a body that was skin-sheathed bone. ”

“ O'Hara was heaved and tugged, first one way, then another, until his body was rolled over on to its back, falling with a dull bump. He shouted once more, putting all the strength that was in him into the yell, and the nearest Murut promptly stamped on his mouth with his horny heel. O'Hara bit viciously at the thing, but his teeth could make no impression upon its leathery under-surface, and before he could shout again he found himself gagged with a piece of wood, which was bound in its place by a couple of withes. ”

“ But not a word will I spake till I have your permission to do so.”
“Thank you, O’Hara: I am sure we shall be good friends.”
“You may bet your life on that! You are a broth of a boy, with five or six millions, more or less, in your trousers-pocket; and you may depind upon it, I’ll stick to you like a brother,” said O’Hara, with a wild laugh.
“Don’t consider me an heir till we have further information. But we were very good friends before I read this message to you.”
“Faix, we were!” ”

“ O'Hara, in believing you to have written a letter to my wife?"
"Is it me?" cried O'Hara in the most guileless astonishment.
"He thinks you are her lover," whispered Stafford in his ear. "Zooks, I can laugh again now! He knows she has got a red-haired lover, and says he will kill every red-haired man in Bath!"
"Sure I have never laid eyes on Lady Standish," said O'Hara to Sir Jasper, "if that is all you want. Sure, I'd have been proud to be her lover if I'd only had the honour of her acquaintance!" ”

“ In an outer room sat O'Hara, writing, reading Theocritus, or a little book on mediaeval embroidery, forefinger on cheek; and anon, absolutely without motive, he would rise, creep, and peep through a keyhole at Hogarth, then on stalking, bowing tiptoe, grinning a rancid grimace of stealth, get back to his seat, and read—the tutor falling over head and ears in love with his pupil: one of those passions that end tragically. ”

“ He tried to recollect what had happened to the sled and the two remaining dogs, standing still to steady his reeling brain for the effort. And then O'Hara came near and he hurried on.
Never in all these centuries could he see O'Hara fully. Sometimes he would stop and turn sharply, but the man was always just beyond the edge of eyesight. And yet he never failed to drop in close behind as soon as Dick went on. He was the only thing real in this whirling world of shadows, and presently he ceased to be O'Hara. ”

“ O'Hara," said Sir Jasper, "will you shake hands with me?"
"With all the pleasure in loife!" cried the genial Irishman. "Faith, 'tis great friends we will be, but perhaps ye had better not introjuce me to ye'r lady, for I'm not to be trusted where the dear creatures are concerned, and so 'tis best to tell you at the outset."
The opponents now shook hands with some feeling on either side. The wound was attended to and several bottles of wine were thereafter cracked in great good-fellowship.
"There is nothing like Canary," vowed O'Hara, "for the power of healing." ”

“ More and more, observing the Degraded—the only less than bestial stupidity of the horde and the derived intelligence or trained reflexes of the Sons—O'Hara was conscious of feeling that it was indeed a sublime intelligence that guided them, something they accepted without challenge as infallible, which in the inevitable pattern of such conceptions that spoke of as the Father but which more probably was a cabal of the more superior of the Sons, a ruling organism probably not unlike the Twelve Old Men of Geneva. ”

“ O'Hara's tone implied that he cared less.
"I hope he is not in debt himself," mused Carstares, "'Tis like enough he is in some muddle. I wish I might persuade him to accept the revenue." He frowned and drummed his fingers on the table.
O'Hara exploded.
"Sure, 'twould be like you to be doing the same. Let the man alone for the Lord's sake, and don't be after worrying your head over a miserable spalpeen that did ye more harm than—"
"Miles, I cannot allow you to speak so of Dick! You do not understand."
"I understand well enough. 'Tis too Christian ye are entirely. ”

“ I knew that no pen, however inspired, could sing the impassioned philosophy of life as the throbbing red throat of the brown thrush can sing, or as O’Hara and I could live it. And, so, I must confess that the idea of the breadfruit sighing as we sat awaiting the sunset’s close and O’Hara impatiently watching for the favourable moment to abduct a Tahitian princess from a pagan palace on a South Sea isle, seemed the perfect music and the most noble endeavour of the Psalm of Life! ”

“ But this fact did not deter O’Hara and myself from wishing to go there. Personally, I have always thought that one has a perfect right to save one’s neck. Man has only one neck, one life, and not always one chance whilst alive of doing better for himself.
The idea that there was really a lonely wooden establishment hidden in the deep seclusion of a certain forest, where hunted men found refuge from the law, was most fascinating to me, and this fascination was the main incentive that took O’Hara and me there. ”

“ Meanwhile, one of the Frenchmen—Baptiste, the waiter, by the way, who had told O’Hara that he saw Monsieur Arndt enter this room—was removing the gag from Grey’s mouth, while others158 were cutting the cords that bound his limbs. For a moment the American’s view of the Irishman’s broad back was cut off by those surrounding him, but the next minute he was on his feet and—but in that instant O’Hara had disappeared. ”

“ The sun had set and the brilliant gold and rose of a marvelous desert evening was flooding the sky. Against this flame of color appeared the outlines of a shack or bungalow surrounded by the few outlying buildings. As the automobile rapidly drew nearer, the door was flung back and a woman stepped out to meet them.
Even in the quick glance that he had of her before the automobile stopped, O’Hara realized she was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. Very tall and superbly formed, she carried herself with a hauteur and coldness that instinctively reminded him of the man in the car. ”

“ Now, the Sons, who are the children of women of the masses, are descended, as are the Degraded themselves, from speaking and thinking men. Like yourself, O'Hara. And I have trained them to recover their lost faculties. Without that training you could not distinguish them from the masses. But no amount of patience will instill in them—recover from their lineal past—the power to think beyond instinctive things. We need a new pattern, a thinking pattern. I have wasted too much of my allotted time in trying to salvage. I must create now. That is, you must create, O'Hara—a new caste, a new race. ”

“ O'Hara cried, pointing at a low hill at a distance in the plain, "sure, gentlemen, and there's our port. Where's the man would cast anchor this side of it?"
O'Hara, Gleazen, and Matterson stood at one side, and Arnold, Abe, and I at the other, with my poor uncle in the middle. We had not concerted to divide thus. Instinctively and unconsciously we separated into hostile factions, with poor Seth Upham—neither fish, flesh, nor fowl, as they say—standing weakly between us. But even so, the enthusiasm of the three was contagious. Weary though we were, we strongly felt it. ”

“ It was plain enough that O'Hara had, as the phrase goes, seen better days. Without question he was a villain, but after all a generous villain. He had been very decent about making amends for that poisoning affair. A cheaper rascal would have behaved otherwise. Ste. Marie suddenly remembered what a friend of his had once said of this mysterious Irishman. The two had been sitting on the terrace of a café, and, as O'Hara passed by, Ste. Marie's friend pointed after him and said: "There goes some of the best blood that ever came out of Ireland. ”

“ Fae Fae’s apparent wraith, with arms outspread, the body swerving with rhythmical beauty, was still flitting noiselessly round the small space, coming toward us!
“Keep back!” I whispered to O’Hara, who was staring over my shoulder, endeavouring to get a better glimpse of the figure. On she came, seemingly draped in veils of the moonlight that was falling through the overspreading, dark-fingered palm-leaves. Her lips had begun a chant, her head turned slightly sideways as on her tripping flight she approached and stared at the mighty, yellow-toothed, wooden deity. ”

“ There's nobody like your dear friends for smelling out an empty purse. Musha!" said Mr. O'Hara, putting his head out of the window, "if the blessed ould chair isn't stopping at me own door!"
A bell pealing through the house confirmed his observation.
"It's a woman! By the powers, it's a woman! Tim, Tim, ye devil!" roared Mr. O'Hara, "come to me this minute, or I'll brain ye." ”

“ They yelled and howled and bayed more frantically than ever; some of them rolled upon the floor, their limbs and faces contorted by paroxysms of savage merriment, while others staggered about, smiting their fellows on their bare shoulders, squeaking like bats, and clicking like demoralised clockwork. A second prod with a sharp point made O'Hara shy across his narrow cage like a fly-bitten horse, and before he could recover his balance a score of delicately handled weapons inflicted light wounds all over his face and hands. ”