“If you stay here for the night,” said Mr. Rust, “to-morrow I’ll suggest to you something that—may possibly interest you to some slight extent.”
With a clumsy blood-red pottery candlestick, which was so careless in detail as to seem to be the unconscious production of a drunken master-potter, the gardener found his room.
(I know it is a shock to you to find it bedtime at this point, but the gardener and I forgot to notice those parts of the day which I have not mentioned.)
He dreamt of red hair, redder than natural, as red as a sunset, seen at close quarters from Paradise. At midnight he awoke, in the clutch of perfectly irrelevant thoughts.
The room was a velvet cube, with the window plastered at one side of it, a spangled square. And the silken moonlight was draped across the floor.
“I am myself,” said the gardener. “I am my world. Nothing matters except me. I am the creator and the created.”
With which happy thought he returned to sleep again.
The Red Place lost its flame-like life at night. Night, that blind angel, has no dealings with colour, and turns even the auburn of the pine-trunks to cold silver. But before the gardener awoke again, the sun had roused the gods of the place to discover the theft of their red gold, and to replace it.
The gardener, as he trilled like a lark in one of the red-tiled bathrooms, was suddenly reminded that he was a merry vagabond.
“I must disappear,” he thought. “No true vagabond ever says, ‘Good-bye, and thank you for my pleasant visit.’”