Ewart as a moral influence was unsatisfactory. I had made up my mind to
put the whole thing before him, partly to see how he took it, and
partly to hear how it sounded when it was said. I asked him to come and
eat with me in an Italian place near Panton Street where one could get
a curious, interesting, glutting sort of dinner for eighteen-pence. He
came with a disconcerting black-eye that he wouldn’t explain. “Not so
much a black-eye,” he said, “as the aftermath of a purple patch....
What’s your difficulty?”
“I’ll tell you with the salad,” I said.
But as a matter of fact I didn’t tell him. I threw out that I was
doubtful whether I ought to go into trade, or stick to teaching in view
of my deepening socialist proclivities; and he, warming with the
unaccustomed generosity of a sixteen-penny Chianti, ran on from that
without any further inquiry as to my trouble.
His utterances roved wide and loose.
“The reality of life, my dear Ponderevo,” I remember him saying very
impressively and punctuating with the nut-crackers as he spoke, “is
Chromatic Conflict ... and Form. Get hold of that and let all these
other questions go. The Socialist will tell you one sort of colour and
shape is right, the Individualist another. What does it all amount to?
What _does_ it all amount to? _Nothing!_ I have no advice to give
anyone,—except to avoid regrets. Be yourself, seek after such beautiful
things as your own sense determines to be beautiful. And don’t mind the
headache in the morning.... For what, after all, is a morning,
Ponderevo? It isn’t like the upper part of a day!”
He paused impressively.
“What Rot!” I cried, after a confused attempt to apprehend him.
“Isn’t it! And it’s my bedrock wisdom in the matter! Take it or leave
it, my dear George; take it or leave it.”... He put down the
nut-crackers out of my reach and lugged a greasy-looking note-book from
his pocket. “I’m going to steal this mustard pot,” he said.