11

Chiffan was the least administrative of all the Group out of which the first World Administration grew. He remained what used to be called a Minister without Portfolio. He joined in the irregular councils that Rud assembled and on increasingly infrequent occasions he talked to Rud and Rud annexed his ideas. But the great World Ministries were developing their own methods of dealing with one another, and the new conjoint sessions of the Law, Education and Biological (Health) Boards were acting as an organ for arbitration and taking more and more responsibility off the shoulders of the council. Rud maintained his closest relations with the World Police under Thirp and the rather ill–defined Ministry for the Protection of the World State, and Chiffan, with his generous salary as consultant–general, was as near an approach to the old–fashioned "independent gentleman" as the new world could show. He spent his days in appreciative living and leisurely writing. With the rapid increase of the world's wealth, a new leisure class of released and superannuated workers was appearing. There were more gentlefolk than ever, and more and more. The normal life labour contribution was now twenty–five thousand hours; there was already great freedom in the way this could be distributed over the lifetime, and it ensured a comfortable minimum existence throughout life. Above that level, there was a great variety of rewards and fortunes to be earned by competent contributions to what was called the surplus of life.

Chiffan lived in a pleasant villa in the Rhone Valley, ten minutes' flying from the Centre, and there he lived with the most intelligent and congenial of all the women he had ever met, his wife, Phoebe Chiffan, who was indeed the twenty–ninth "real mistress" of his philandering career. Their mutual affection was as manifest as their mutual tolerance, and though she was, as people say, "faithful" to him, she viewed his active and imaginative interest in the whole spectacle of womankind with an amused sympathy. The only person in the world about whom she felt a twinge of jealousy was Rud. She felt Rud was a monster, she thought his leadership of the Group uncanny. When she saw that Chiffan was troubled in his mind and asked him point–blank what he was worrying about, and when he said "I'm bothered a bit over Rud," she said "I thought as much."

"You are stupid about Rud," he said.

"No—you are."

"He's getting into a—a state of lonely misery.

"Isn't that his own affair?"

"You're inhuman."

"I'm feminine."

"I owe everything to him."

"And he to you. It's fifty–fifty."

"I've got a sort of maternal feeling about him. I've known him—"

"Four times as long as you have known me. What right has a man to be maternal?"

"Men are—and even some women."

She leant out of the hammock and pulled his hair. "All right, Chiff–chaff," she said. "Tell me about your Rud."

"What I—what we have always liked about him," said Chiffan, "is a sort of diabolical energy. His drive. There is something outrageous in his make–up that won us all. And something that still intrigues me. There are times when I want to follow that man about like a child following a circus show. Why does he do things? He's an abject coward—these are things not to be repeated, my dear—and also he is a desperate fighter. Do you know I think at times that he is the master of the world to–day simply because he has a frantic fear of power—in the hands of anyone else."

She ruffled Chiffan's hair by way of showing she was listening.

"So he has got it all into his own hands," she said.

"And he doesn't know what to do with it, and now he doesn't know what to do with himself."

"But isn't he putting the world in order at a tremendous rate? Everybody says so."

"No. We are. At least, the others are. All that he does is to watch—and make that keyhole Minister of his, Thirp, watch—that nobody anywhere turns any official authority conceded him, into power. And Thirp—well, Thirp bothers him with suspicions. Things are going well with the world, but unless they go a little wrong, what is the use of Thirp? Thirp sees to that. Thirp keeps him irritated and uneasy and he has no distractions. I'm sorry, darling Phoebe—you know I love you, you know how I love you—but I don't want my ugly little Thunder–god to culminate in misery. He has made the whole spectacle of life rich and ridiculous for me. And now he is—he has a sort of greyness. He is bored or angry or afraid—afraid of things coming back—all day, and at night they give him drugs—and the best of drugs lower one and give one dreams. I know he has dreams. I didn't think things would take this turn with him and it distresses me. It distresses me, my dear. Love me, love my Rud, Phoebe. I did a lot to make him what he is. You help me with Rud." "How can I help?"

"Advice. The wisdom of your sex. Give me ideas what to do for him. You are all born with a natural interest in us. You are twenty years younger than I, and all the ages wiser."

"It is good for men to have such beliefs," said Phoebe. "But you must tell me first what you think, and then I will tell you just how right you are."

"That may be the way of it," said Chiffan.

"Well?"

"I said Rud has been driven by fear. He has been driven by an extreme dread of domination. He cannot endure the thought of anyone having domination over him. Until he became World Director he never felt safe about that. He needs constant reassurance still. That is plain enough even for you to see, my dear."

"Did you say just now that I was all the ages wiser than you?"

"Yes. When things are put before you. But what I have only glimpsed by fits and starts about him—until quite recently—is something else. Rud, I realise, has a profound, maybe innate dread of the closest of all forms of domination—love."

"Go on."

"His capacity for love—if he ever had much capacity for love—has atrophied. Or you can put it, if you like, in quite another way. It has vanished and then returned in a vague, cloudy desire to be appreciated, admired, obeyed—loved by all the world. Without any return. All this accumulating desire for public adoration, all this increasing exhibitionism—"

He thought profoundly.

"You see, Phoebe, you and I assuage each other's egotisms. To a very considerable extent. Unless they get wasted, or crippled or perverted in some way, men and women get together as you and I have got together at last…We get a domination over one another. And so long as things seem fair and equal we don't resent that. We begin with liking and love–making—yes, we keep on with love–making—but the chemistry of body and mind works so as to give us a control over each other's self–respect…That's the sane way of life. For anyone with a rational imagination. When a man is happy with his woman and a woman is happy with her man and they are happy in their friends, neither of them aches—as he does—to possess the world and the sun and the moon. Am I right?"

"Sweetheart, you are right. Though it took you some years of sedulous research—"

Chiffan waved aside what threatened to be a troublesome digression. "You kept out of my way," he said. "The point about Rud, Phoebe, is just what you have said to me. There is nobody in the world to say to him 'Sweetheart, you are right.'"

"And that aches?"

"Damnably. It is the fundamental ache. The better you are fed and clothed and gratified, the more that ache for reassuring appreciation takes hold of you. The core of happiness is to have some one with whom you are essentially right and important—however wrong and ineffective you are. Rud hasn't loved, doesn't love and doesn't know how to love."

"Now why?" said Phoebe, with her chin between her two fists.

"Missed it."

"You don't mean he's homosexual?"

"No. Not a bit of it. And besides, I'm told, they can be quite affectionate."

"Asexual?"

"Nobody is."

"Then, what?"

"I said that his ruling motive is dread. Something happened. Something humiliating. Quite early perhaps. But something that turned him back upon himself."

"Narcissism."

"If you like to call it that. A trifle too floral for my taste. We want a third word; there's homosexual and heterosexual—why not autosexual? He is afraid of women. He dare not risk an approach to them. He is afraid of humiliation, he is darkened by a dread of them. And, my dear, dimly, he wants what you give us. He missed the coarse enterprise of adolescence, which lays the foundations of confidence. He feels now that that triumph—it is a triumph, Phoebe—is not for him, and so he has trained himself not to attempt, not to betray a flicker of desire."

"Queer creatures we humans are!"

"Am I right? Can you imagine him as a lover?"

"Ugh!"

"For any woman?"

"Women are queer things. Not all alike. More variable perhaps than men in these things. I can't put myself—can't imagine myself—in any woman's skin but my own. There is a brutal fastidiousness in my physical make–up anyhow. Let alone that I love you, so that I'm specialised now for you. But before ever I met you I am certain he would have seemed not simply indifferent, but repulsive—disgusting."

"I wonder," said Chiffan, "how far you speak for even a majority of women?"

"Any woman who answers for the behaviour of any woman but herself is a fool," said Phoebe.

"But even as what they used to call a Platonic lover?"

"Some women seem capable of monstrous tolerations. You and I are imaginative, sensuous people. We can't stand people who are not good–looking. We are a normal easygoing couple. There are women without sensory imaginations, without physical pride, gross women, acquisitive women, prestige–lovers, women with a sort of blunt, savage brutality of ownership…But go on."

"Well, you will see now what I mean when I say that Rud is living in an unbroken egotism, all inside himself. A sort of moral potbound plant. Love is the natural force that breaks down egotism, takes you out to living, to personal self–forgetfulness, but he has never had even a sentimental relationship. He had no intimate life, no life of the affections, at all; and so his egotism now has become inflamed and dreadful."

"But what am I to do about it?"

"Help me to do something to break down his loneliness." "But how?"

"Make some sort of social life for him. Get him into contact with human beings, easy, delightful, everyday human beings."

"But how? And where?"

"I don't know how. That is why I come to you. Social life is woman's work. He distresses me, I tell you. In a way, Phoebe, I love him. He's been a great fact in my life. And I can't think what to do about it. There he is away there, either working or alone. I've been watching him. Things are getting urgent."

Phoebe swung down out of the hammock and confronted Chiffan.

"You darling," she said. "You broke out of your egotism quite early in life. You tore it to rags. I suppose you've always been breaking out of your egotism in all directions—when did you begin, dear? I never thought being a rake was a synonym for altruism. Bless you—I don't mind—as long as you don't dwell on it. I'm glad you've loved so many people. I will think of something—somehow. You've made me do some difficult things. But this—what shall I call it?—rehumanising of the Master Director!"