This was the priest’s pose.
“You have no vices?” he said, in a slow earnest voice. “How I envy you!”
The gardener was more concerned with the varied conversation of the sea. Each wave of it flung back some magic unspeakable word over its shoulder as it ran by. But he answered the priest:
“You don’t really envy me, you would rather be yourself with virtues than me without vices.”
The priest smiled the inscrutable smile of the vague-minded. “You have a very original way of talking. You interest me. Yerce, yerce. Tell me what you were thinking about when I came up.”
The gardener did so at once. Sometimes his imagination weighed heavily upon his mind, and he expanded, regardless of his listeners.
“I was thinking about the things I saw,” he said. “Things that I often see before I have time to think. Snapshots of things that even I have never actually imagined. Do you know, wonders crash across my eyes like a blow, when I am thinking of something else. Ghosts out of my enormous past, I suppose. There was a very white beach that I saw just now, with opal-coloured waves running along it, and a mist whitening the sky. There were very broad red men in grey wolf-skins, standing in the water, dragging dead bodies from the sea. There were little children, blue and thin, lying dead upon the beach. I know the way children’s ribs stand out when they are dead. I have never seen a dead child, except those....”
“You ought to write fiction, yerce, yerce,” said the priest. “You have a very strong imagination.”
“I have,” admitted the gardener. “But not strong enough to control these visions that besiege me.”
The priest, who had preached more and known less about visions than any one else I can think of, was constrained to silence.