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The C onscious Epicure
By FAITH SERVICE
Photo C. Smith Ciardner
IT was 4.30 p. M. The lobby of the Algonquin was gray with quietude. One or two people moved about, pussy-footed. The call-boys dozed on their benches. On a sudden the revolving door revolved with a right good will. There was a gust of air, an atmospheric stir, awakening . . .
“Er — ah — do I owe you a bill?” asked an agitated voice, with something of, some kind of, an accent.
“You do,” replied an emphatic voice.
There was the scratching of a pen on a check.
I awoke to the fact that the apparently, only apparently, agitated inquirer was my quarry for the day — Eugene O’Brien. I registered a subconscious faci; “Gosh, isn’t he healthy!” As he glanced quickly about, caught my obviously interrogative eyes and advanced springily upon me, the thought was re-registered. “Awfully fit,” I added, as an addenda.
Athletic club, I afterward learnt, so many “rounds,” deliberate training and all that. Efficiency^
He said, in his rather jerky manner, that he knew he was late, was awfully sorry he was late, would I accept his apology for being late, and before I could inform him that he was not late, he had, somehow or other, maneuvered me into the grill of the Algonquin and was suggesting “a steak, a rice pudding, now what will you have ?”
Awfully interesting people seeped into the Algonquin at one time or another, he went on. Samuel Merwin was stopping there at that very time. Dorothy Dalton was there. He himself frequented it because he thought it had an atmosphere — really an atmosphere. It was restful and one could talk. Talk was the great thing, after all. Pity if one could not talk or find some one to talk to.
When I consider my talk with Eugene O’Brien I have the jolly glow one has when one has talked with a jolly, interesting person — a person who has not thought to the exclusion of living vitally nor lived to the flatulent exclusion of thinking. A person, moreover, with a sportsmanlike, thoroly understandable point of view and a sense of humor.
When I consider writing said talk for the further enlightenment of the general public I am seized with an acute mental something or other. We “just talked” that’s the way it was. Being Eugene O’Brien, it He is not the type who was, or ever could be, up for inspection, on dress parade. If he knew, when he entered the Algonquin, that he was destined to talk for publication, he forgot all about it the moment he actually began to talk, except to observe, with pathos, that he and all people in the public eye are “victims.” If he has a professional manner it falls from him lightly as a mantle which is essentially superfluous. He cannot, he says, talk “trot” to a per.son. “Not to know a person well,” he declared, “is a damnable
Eugene O’Brien is redolent of the sheer pleasure of being alive. Life has been kind to him, generouslj’ colorful. In return, he has been kind to Life, met her fairly, played the game. Nothing of the snob; nothing of the unhealthy cynic ; nothing whatever of the misanthrope. Health . . . everywhere
couldn’t be any other way.
(Twenty four)