The Lost Prince by Selden Edwards Page B

looking for a T. Williams Honeycutt. What other choice was there?
    “Thank you for seeing me,” she said after taking his hand. “I know this must be peculiar for you.”
    “I don’t often have visitors in here,” he said, gesturing to the clutter in his office and offering a gentle smile that Eleanor, much to her surprise, found reassuring. He was of medium height, lean of build, and only slightly ill at ease having a visitor intrude into the confined space of his office. “I’m not the sort that people come to visit.” Almost as an afterthought, he cleared off a chair and offered it. “And just why are you here?” There was a kind of gracelessness to his question.
    “I will be direct,” Eleanor said. “I have come on a mission, Mr. Honeycutt. I have heard of your brilliance.”
    “Heavens, no,” he said. “Just an eternal predoctorate student, tryingto get all of this organized”—again, he gestured around the room with his hand—“into something my betters will accept as a dissertation. The university is waiting for me to produce something of value. I wrote a controversial paper in my senior year that got everyone’s attention. Now they want me to prove it.”
    “I have heard,” Eleanor said.
    “I guess I stumbled onto some ideas no one else had thought of.”
    “A dialogue with Democritus, was it not?”
    He looked startled for a moment. “You have heard.”
    “I have,” she said. “You caused quite a stir. And I have heard of your method: a dialogue with a character in your dreams. Some call it brilliant.”
    Honeycutt laughed. “And some called it deranged.
Schizophrenic,
I believe they say, one who hears voices.”
    “But everyone agrees what came out in this dialogue was brilliant.”
    “Even if it came from derangement?” He paused, looking suddenly very nervous and distracted. “It is about the atom, you know. Those who believe my dialogue to be of value wish for me to read and research everything known so far and think perhaps that I have said—without knowing it—something new and revolutionary. They wish me to
grow into it,
I believe those who believe say.”
    “And those who do not believe?”
    “They wish to have me committed.”
    “And what do you say?”
    “Somewhere in between, I guess. Democritus really did appear in my dreams, and he spoke for himself within the dream. That is not so demented, is it? To have someone speak in a dream?”
    “No,” she said. “I would say it is quite normal.”
    “I was just the scribe. I did not try to explain anything on my own. I just wrote it down. I guess that is the disturbing part for some.”
    “Disturbing for you?” she asked.
    Ted Honeycutt looked away. “Oh, no, I have been living within my head for a long time. I am like the ancient alchemists, my professors say, always looking for the
prima materia,
but it comes with a problem.”
    “And that is?”
    “I seek this
prima materia,
they say, at the expense of my relations with people.”
    “William James thinks you brilliant.”
    Suddenly, the young man’s mood changed. “You don’t know that,” he snapped. “It is rumored, but you don’t know that.”
    The words took her aback for an instant. “I do know it,” she said, not backing off. “In fact, I know it quite well.”
    “How could you know such a thing?” There was what seemed like defiance now in his eyes.
    “Dr. James told me.”
    Honeycutt scrutinized her seriously for a moment, then softened. “You know Dr. James?”
    “He is my godfather,” she said. “He was a great friend of my deceased mother. We confer with some regularity and with some intimacy. In the flesh,” she added, trying unsuccessfully for a note of levity. “He had you in class, I believe. I asked him about you, and he has mentioned a very high regard.”
    Ted Honeycutt looked her over for a long moment, still skeptical. “You know that?” he said. “William James really told you that?”
    “I know that. He really told me