Tiger Woman by Betty May

Author:Betty May
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gerald Duckworth & Co

CHAPTER VI

THE MYSTIC

Raoul—The Princess Amen Ra—Marriage again—The spirit photograph—My walk to “The Trout”—An apparition—I meet the Mystic—The White Magician—The Mystic at the Harlequin—I visit the Mystic’s house—Raoul decides to go to Sicily.

IT was soon after this that I met Raoul and we began to go out a lot together. At the time I am thinking of it was past midnight and pouring with heavy, warm rain, as if it were coming down from a shower-bath.

Raoul and I were both in evening dress, without wraps or protection of any kind. We had been dancing at the Harlequin Club, and he had had one of his sudden impulses to go out as we were for a walk in the rain. It was the sort of mad thing he loved doing.

“It’s the most glorious sensation in the world,” he said to me. He was very clever, and had rather a deep voice and always talked in short, excited bursts. His age was twenty-three, but his complexion was that of a boy of fifteen.

We walked round and round Golden Square.

“The great thing is to abandon yourself,” .he explained carefully and seriously. “Revel in wetness.” His collar and shirt were by now a slimy pulp. “My collar feels as if it were made of soft velvet. But if I had on a mackintosh every drop that penetrated to my linen would positively sear my soul. It’s just a matter of acceptance.” Then he branched off on a long description of how he spent a night naked on a moor, in the rain.

I did not listen very closely. I was thinking how extraordinary this all was. The war was over at last and life seemed to have become less hectic and muddled. By this time I was quite well known, and yet here I was on the point of getting married again with little prospect of it being more of a success than it had been in the past.

Who was this impulsive, clear-eyed boy ? Why was I walking with him ? The sane, sensible explanation was that he had fallen in love with me, and we were shortly to be married. . . . Quite simple.

I had often been told about him by friends of mine from Oxford, where he was regarded as something of a hero because of his roof-climbing and other escapades. I had always heard that he was a great woman-hater and that women bored him so much that he would hardly speak to them even if introduced. In this, at least, he was different to most other admirers I have had, most of whom have held quite different views on this subject. The first time I saw him was in the Harlequin. He jerked back his long fair hair when we were introduced and asked in his very man-of-the-world voice, “May I sit down?” I made room for him.

“So you are a woman-hater?” I said.

“All Antony’s love for Cleopatra,” he quite seriously replied, “was nothing to my love for you.”

That was typical of Raoul, toppling from reality into unreality.

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