He shook his head. "No, I was glad to talk with you. And don't forget the money. This other self, this whatever-you-may-call-it told me to give it to you. I gather that it's in the nature of a retainer of some sort."
"But this is double talk," I told him, almost angrily. "The money comes from you."
"Not at all," he said. "It comes from a special fund that was started many years ago. It didn't seem quite right that I should reap all benefit from all of these ideas which were not really mine. So I began paying ten per cent profits into a special fund…"
"Suggested, more than likely, by this second self?
"Yes," he said. "I think you are right, although it was so long ago that I cannot truly say. But in any case, I set up the fund and through the years have paid out varying amounts at the direction of whoever it may be that shares my mind with me." I stared at him, and it was rude of me, I know. But no man, I told myself, could sit as calmly as Sherwood sat and talk about an unknown personality that shared his mind with him.
Even after all the years, it still would not be possible.
"The fund," said Sherwood, quietly, "is quite a tidy sum, even with the amounts I've paid out of it. It seems that since this fellow came to live with me, everything I've touched has simply turned to money."
"You take a chance," I said, "telling this to me."
"You mean that you could tell it around about me?
I nodded. "Not that I would," I said.
"I don't think you will," he said. "You'd get laughed at for your trouble. No one would believe you."
"I don't suppose they would."
"Brad," he said, almost kindly, "don't be a complete damn fool. Pick up that envelope and put it in your pocket. Come back some other time and talk with me — any time you want. I have a hunch there may be a lot of things we'll want to talk about." I reached out my hand and picked up the money. I stuffed it in my pocket.
"Thank you, sir," I said.
"Don't mention it," he told me. He raised a hand. "Be seeing you," he said.
4
I WENT slowly down the hall and there was no sign of Nancy, nor was she on the porch, where I had half expected to find her waiting for me. She had said yes, that I would see her later, that we had a lot to talk about, and I had thought, of course, that she meant tonight. But she might not have meant tonight. She might have meant some other time than this. Or she might have wafted and then grown tired of waiting. After all, I had spent a long time with her father.
The moon had risen in a cloudless sky and there was not a breath of breeze. The great oaks stood like graven monuments and the summer night was filled with the glittering of moonbeams. I walked down the stairs and stood for a moment at their foot and it seemed for all the world that I was standing in a circle of enchantment. For this, I thought, could not be the old, familiar earth, this place of ghostly, brooding oaken sentinels, this air so drenched with moonlight, this breathless, waiting silence hanging over all, and the faint, other-world perfume that hung above the soft blackness of the ground.
Then the enchantment faded and the glitter went away and I was back once more in the world I knew.
There was a chill in the summer air. Perhaps a chill of disappointment, the chill of being booted out of fairyland, the chill of knowing there was another place I could not hope to stay. I felt the solid concrete of the walk underneath my feet and I could see that the shadowed oaks were only oaks and not graven monuments.
I shook myself, like a dog coming out of water, and my wits came back together and I went on down the walk. As I neared the car, I fumbled in my pocket for my keys, walking around on the driver's side and opening the door.
I was halfway in the seat before I saw her sitting there, next to the other door.
"I thought," she said, "that you were never coming. What did you and Father find to talk so long about?
"A number of things," I told her. "None of them important."
"Do you see him often?"
"No," I said. "Not often." Somehow I didn't want to tell her this was the first time I had ever talked with him.
I groped in the dark and found the lock and slid in the key.
"A drive," I said. "Perhaps some place for a drink."
"No, please," she said. "I'd rather sit and talk." I settled back into the seat.
"It's nice tonight," she said. "So quiet. There are so few places that are really quiet."
"There's a place of enchantment," I told her, "just outside your porch. I walked into it, but it didn't last. The air was full of moonbeams and there was a faint perfume…"
"That was the flowers," she said.
"What flowers?
"There's a bed of them in the curve of the walk. All of them those lovely flowers that your father found out in the woods somewhere."
"So you have them too," I said. "I guess everyone in the village has a bed of them."
"Your father," she said, "was one of the nicest men I ever knew. When I was a little girl he always gave me flowers. I'd go walking past and he'd pick a flower or two for me." Yes, I thought, I suppose he could be called a nice man. Nice and strong and strange, and yet, despite his strength and strangeness, a very gentle man. He had known the ways of flowers and of all other plants. His tomato plants, I remembered, had grown big and stout and of a dark, deep green, and in the spring everyone had come to get tomato plants from him.
And there had been that day he'd gone down Dark Hollow way to deliver some tomato plants and cabbage and a box full of perennials to the widow Hicklin and had come back with half a dozen strange, purple-blossomed wild flowers, which he had dug up along the road and brought home, their roots wrapped carefully in a piece of burlap.
He had never seen such flowers before and neither, it turned out, had anybody else. He had planted them in a special bed and had tended them with care and the flowers had responded gratefully underneath his hands. So that today there were few flower beds in the village that did not have some of those purple flowers, my father's special flowers.
"Those flowers of his," asked Nancy. "Did he ever find what kind of flowers they were?"
"No," I said, "he didn't."
"He could have sent one of them to the university or someplace. Someone could have told him exactly what he'd found."
"He talked of it off and on. But he never got around to really doing it. He always kept so busy. There were so many things to do. The greenhouse business keeps you on the run."
"You didn't like it, Brad?"
"I didn't really mind it. I'd grown up with it and I could handle it. But I didn't have the knack. Stuff wouldn't grow for me."
She stretched, touching the roof with balled fists.
"It's good to be back," she said. "I think I'll stay a while. I think Father needs to have someone around."
"He said you planned to write."
"He told you that?"
"Yes," I said. "he did. He didn't act as if he shouldn't."
"Oh, I don't suppose it makes any difference. But it's a thing that you don't talk about — not until you're well along on it. There are so many things that can go wrong with writing. I don't want to be one of those pseudo-literary people who are always writing something they never finish, or talking about writing something that they never start."
"And when you write," I asked, "what will you write about?"
"About right here," she said. "About this town of ours."
"Millville?
"Why, yes, of course," she said. "About the village and its people."
"But," I protested, "there is nothing here to write about."