9

"It's curious," began Chiffan, and stopped short. "Yes?" said Bodisham, who had a marked tolerance for Chiffan's excursions.

"I suppose," said Chiffan, "that with man just as much as with any other social animal, sex was the original binding force of the community, and I suppose our religion, our morality arose mainly out of sexual subordination and sexual tabus. So the anthropologists tell us. If perhaps I temper my Freud with Adler, still all the same I think the main strand of emotional life is sexual. Maybe fear, hunger and the power–craving are more elementary than sex, but sex is bound up with most of the power–craving…"

Norvel nodded his head.

"Well, here we are organising a world first to defeat, distribute and disperse the power–craving and so end war, and secondly to secure and distribute abundance to everyone. Good. We shall do it. What of sex? We are going to release something which hitherto has been kept under the severest restraint, which hitherto has been the chief force harnessed by morality, which has been in fact for most people the significance of morality, the sexual urge and the sexual imagination. That is, I have to point out, a complete change of function for the social organisation. Our Fundamental Law is just bundling the original social force out of the court room to do what it likes unchallenged…"

"What have you to suggest?" said Bodisham. "Are you suggesting a control?"

"I am suggesting nothing," said Chiffan. "I am reflecting." Bodisham began to fiddle with his pencil. He had expected a project of some sort.

"Sex," Chiffan went on, "is something absolutely primary in this queer beast, Man. Perhaps I see things with a certain bias, but it appears to me that when the animal man is neither afraid, nor hungry, nor exhausted, then it is that the energies within him, the endocrines, the chemical conspirators that drive him, are turned in the direction of self–assertion through sex. Concentrated on that end. Security and abundance release sex. Wherever there is sex to be released. I think the intimate history of what one might call emancipated classes in the past—courts, aristocracies, plutocracies for example, points in that direction. Sex is released, exposed and elaborated. Life ceases to be serious. Gallantry and art break out. Sex lies in wait for every sort of success. It follows success about. That has always been so, and I think it is likely to be so always. No Revolution can change that."

"Yes, yes," said Bodisham. "But how does it affect the Fundamental Law?"

"I am considering the problem of surplus energy," said Chiffan, "as an explosive force. I am speculating about what is to happen when the Common Man begins to realise that the scramble for life is over for good and all. Our Fundamental Law is ensuring his permanent immunity from violent termination by explosives, machinery and insane hatreds and intolerances. But also it is creating a curious gap in living—unknown to the adult life of any other animal—leisure, active leisure, leisure with surplus energy…And now, says the animal, what am I to do?…

"While we were all within a reasonable distance of being shot, life was eventful and we had no sense of any emptiness in things. A man with some one in hot pursuit of him was never really bored. But now, now it is going to be different."

Norvel, with his hands relaxed on the table, considered Chiffan. Bodisham began to draw little diagrams on his blotting–pad as he listened. Dreed seemed lost in thoughts of his own, and Roots, who had to fly back to the Sahara irrigation works before night, turned to stare out of the great window at the afternoon sky.

"When the pursuit relaxes," Chiffan went on, "then our problem changes. Two things, I imagine, may happen to a hunted man when the hunt is over. He may doubt if it is over. He may think that the hunter is still about, but hiding and creeping—and he won't know what to do about that. And that will make him uneasy. And also the mere fact of having made his escape and won his flight will also leave him rather at loose ends."

"You mean man in general?" said Norvel.

"Man in particular," said Chiffan. "Perhaps I am talking of Everyman when in fact I am really thinking of the Common Man who has come through the Revolution. He is going to feel 'something is still coming for me and I am doing nothing about it, something is escaping me and I am doing nothing about that either.' That may lead to complicated trouble. Trouble for our generation in general and for us in particular. The World Peace we have won was well worth living for and dying for. Now we have it, it is nothing. It is just a danger abolished. We have to go on living."

"Creation and constructive work," said Bodisham. "There is no end to that."

"Knowledge," said Norvel. "Men are scarcely beginning to explore life and their own possibilities."

"Common men don't realise that," said Chiffan. "At present, Norvel. Until you and your colleagues educate them up to that realisation, it's just as though it wasn't so…Common men, I tell you, are going to be most damnably bored—in the years ahead of us. Men much more than women. Maybe sex is the actual line of relief. An efflorescence of sex—and sublimated sex, art, decoration, music, may be the natural and necessary relief…I don't know."

He stopped short and shrugged his shoulders.

Bodisham shrugged his shoulders.

"I suppose you will draft this section, Bodisham?" said Norvel.

Bodisham nodded and pushed his scribbled blotting–pad away from him. Dreed sat up and Roots returned from his contemplation of the clouds. The session was over…

Norvel spoke to Chiffan as they left the room.

"I have been thinking, very much as you have been thinking," he said. "I too think—the Common Man—in particular—in one particular instance—may be getting bored—and I don't know what to do about it."