"The Debatable Land": A Novel

by Arthur Colton

In answer to the question, "What am I in my being, my centre and self?" that centre and self seemed to grow featureless to his questioning. The continual acting of a part suggested the question—his being able to assume a character, to fill it out, to mould himself to it, and so to act it consistently and hardly with conscious effort, emphasized the question. Had he no shape of his own to protest against the presumption of other shapes? Was a man no more in reality than a piece of lead pipe for ideas, impressions, and emotions of unknown origin to run through for the mere purpose of passage, and finally to wear thin and wear out? Not altogether, since each experience seemed to leave him not what he was before. The meeting with Daddy Joe and with the general by the burning railroad had left persistent memories. These two at least seemed to him to have centre, character, and anchorage. They stood out in distinction. They had shape and color and definition, and a certain inner stature. Together with this distinctness and stature there had been noticeable in both a singular absorption in something not themselves. The general had seemed to think there was more point in his work than in himself, at least to turn to his work as if he thought it best to act on that belief—Daddy Joe to have given up his soul to wonder and awe of his visitor. The text of one of the tracts he had given to Daddy Joe had been, "He that loseth himself shall find himself," and he remembered noticing Daddy Joe's wonder and troubled look, and thinking him badly lost. It was a cryptic kind of saying—"He that loseth himself shall find himself."

This business by the Shenandoah, this close fingering of peril and card-play between life and death, both parties being sharpers, ought properly to be absorbing and exciting. To attain distinctness, how could one be better elsewhere than in the valley of the Shenandoah, in an isolation so complete from all whom he met from day to day, hostile in purpose to them all, a single eddy against a wide current? Yet, when he looked within himself he seemed to see a space merely where forms flitted through and singing gusts of wind passed, but none found a home. The general at his work for a cause that was a doomed anachronism was something. Daddy Joe, in adoration of his hollow demi-god and shamming evangelist, was something. "Who or what am I? Is there any truth or any lie that from the bottom of me I believe, any goal I hope for, any man or woman I cling to?" One pictured the individual to be a kind of self-fed fire. One denied conventions of the mind and claimed his issue to be his own, his solitary pilgrimage from one eternity to another; he would look about him as he went and take note, neither lose himself nor cloud his eye nor cumber his feet, for the time would be short, and there would be much to see. Now, what he was doing and had done was nothing, for he did not care about it; and what he had felt and thought was little, only those flitting forms and gusts of wind that made a stir in their passage and left echoes behind them—some sandy sediment, perhaps—some changes in the mould or shell.

If men, failing to find the infinite and the spirit outside of themselves—anywhere above or beneath or around—concluded it must be within, there lay the logic of their introspection. How, then, if in the centre of that "within" were found only an echoing space? At the touch of this discovery would not all structured dreams fall suddenly to dust and ashes, all illumined purposes lose their flush? "Be yourself," cried the latest seers, rising from the discouragement of faiths faded into myths, an ancient sun frightened from the eastern skies by their questioning. "Maintain your poise, look within, for there hides divinity in that holy of holies of a man of which his body is the temple. A pilgrim you are, from the darkness behind to the mystery before, and the universe is a road for your travelling soul." "Be myself! Who or what am I? The holy of holies appears empty, and no altar is there, either, nor self-fed fire." Was the universe so mad a joke as to be a road merely for the travelling of such bubbles, blown spherically with tainted air, colored with solar fantasies, apt to dissolve suddenly to a drop of soapy moisture in the dust by some such accident as was probable enough in the valley of the Shenandoah?

The epochs in life, then, were not its physical events, but crises in thought, some sudden or gradual conviction or disillusioning. Gard felt now that this had come upon him gradually, beginning from the Peninsular campaign.

No doubt, whatever one thought was the dwelling-place of divinity, or whatever he called the one thing worth while, if it presently appeared not to be there, there was always a marvellous emptiness in its place, a world apparently convicted of barrenness, since its growths were convicted of illusion—a point in experience once called "the Everlasting No," a period of fretful discontent. It did not seem probable that the lost law and divinity were at sanctuary in that discontent.

Meanwhile in the valley of the Shenandoah the oak foliage kindled and smouldered in dull red, as if its approaching death were a matter of pride and stately celebration, and Gard led a singular dual existence, one side of which seemed to be a staring at a topless and bottomless distaste, and the other to be an argument that good whiskey was cheaply and secretly distilled in certain portions of western Virginia, to the discomfiture of the United States—that, if the Confederate army would purchase and absorb enough of it, the capture of Washington would become immediately probable.

The behavior, the schemes, inventions and discourses of this secondary personage of his creating had an objective interest. It seemed to Gard to be in its way a noteworthy character, judged as a piece of creative fiction.

It was modelled on Mavering, but gathered details from day to day and perfected its symmetry. It appeared to have volition, a speech and individual oddities all its own, which he was hardly aware of having invented.

Some days after his return he came by the Opequan and the place where he had fallen headlong in the road with the man of the bandage. He turned his horse into the bushes. The body lay still in its place. The "secondary personage" commented aloud in character, and to Gard's surprise.

"It appears you didn' furnish that cyarfully boiled description."