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The Supreme Illusion
by
“Really!” I remarked, as calmly as I could, and added a shocking lie: “Well, I’m not surprised!” And at the same time I could hear myself saying a few days later at the office of my paper: “I met Octave Boissy in Paris. Went to school with him, you know.”
“You’d forgotten my Christian name, probably,” he said.
“No, I hadn’t,” I answered. “Your Christian name was Minor. You never had any other!” He smiled kindly. “But what on earth are you doing here?”
Octave Boissy was a very wealthy man. He even looked a very wealthy man. He was one of the darlings of success and of an absurdly luxurious civilization. And he seemed singularly out of place in the vast, banal foyer of the Hotel Terminus, among the shifting, bustling crowd of utterly ordinary, bourgeois, moderately well-off tourists and travellers and needy touts. He ought at least to have been in a very select private room at the Meurice or the Bristol, if in any hotel at all!
“The fact is, I’m neurasthenic,” he said simply, just as if he had been saying, “The fact is, I’ve got a wooden leg.”
“Oh!” I laughed, determined to treat him as Boissy Minor, and not as Octave Boissy.
“I have a morbid horror of walking in the open air. And yet I cannot bear being in a small enclosed space, especially when it’s moving. This is extremely inconvenient. Mais que veux-tu?… Suis comme ca!”
“Je te plains” I put in, so as to return his familiar and flattering “thou” immediately.
“I was strongly advised to go and stay in the country,” he went on, with the same serious, wistful simplicity, “and so I ordered a special saloon carriage on the railway, so as to have as much breathing room as possible; and I ventured from my house to this station in an auto. I thought I could surely manage that. But I couldn’t! I had a terrible crisis on arriving at the station, and I had to sit on a luggage-truck for four hours. I couldn’t have persuaded myself to get into the saloon carriage for a fortune! I couldn’t go back home in the auto! I couldn’t walk! So I stepped into the hotel. I’ve been here ever since.”
“But when was this?”
“Three months ago. My doctors say that in another six weeks I shall be sufficiently recovered to leave. It is a most distressing malady. Mais que veux-tu? I have a suite in the hotel and my own servants. I walk out here into the hall because it’s so large. The hotel people do the best they can, but of course–” He threw up his hands. His resigned, gentle smile was at once comic and tragic to me.
“But do you mean to say you couldn’t walk out of that door and go home?” I questioned.
“Daren’t!” he said, with finality. “Come to my rooms, will you, and have some tea.”
II
A little later his own valet served us with tea in a large private drawing-room on the sixth or seventh floor, to reach which we had climbed a thousand and one stairs; it was impossible for Octave Boissy to use the lift, as he was convinced that he would die in it if he took such a liberty with himself. The room was hung with modern pictures, such as had certainly never been seen in any hotel before. Many knick-knacks and embroideries were also obviously foreign to the hotel.
“But how have you managed to attend the rehearsals of the new play?” I demanded.
“Oh!” said he, languidly, “I never attend any rehearsals of my plays. Mademoiselle Lemonnier sees to all that.”
“She takes the leading part in this play, doesn’t she, according to the posters?”
“She takes the leading part in all my plays,” said he.
“A first-class artiste, no doubt? I’ve never seen her act.”
“Neither have I!” said Octave Boissy. And as I now yielded frankly to my astonishment, he added: “You see, I am not interested in the theatre. Not only have I never attended a rehearsal, but I have never seen a performance of any of my plays. Don’t you remember that it was engineering, above all else, that attracted me? I have a truly wonderful engineering shop in the basement of my house in the Avenue du Bois. I should very much have liked you to see it; but you comprehend, don’t you, that I’m just as much cut off from the Avenue du Bois as I am from Timbuctoo. My malady is the most exasperating of all maladies.”