home  >  books by FWB >  1929, The Three Half Moons

PART I

I

THE THREE HALF-MOONS

The Three Half-Moons lie concealed in the valley at the back of Maori Leap. The district, as every visitor to New Zealand knows, is one of the most awe-inspiring and romantic to be found on any continent or island. The eye is bewildered by the cluster of thickly wooded peaks that, crowding closely round and looking sternly down, pour their brawling torrents into the swiftly rushing waters of the Gorge.

Those were great days — the days in which we camped among the giant ferns in the sheltered hollow of Tomahawk Cove, I can feel at this moment the stinging slap with which the mountain winds greeted us, morning by morning, as we emerged from our cozy tents. And there, staring at us from across the stream, was the frowning face of Maori Leap!

Maori Leap is the dizzy height from whose splintered summit the graceful Kahahapa, the daughter of the dreaded war chief, made her never-to-be-forgotten plunge. In a desperate effort to save the life of her lover, Kahahapa found herself hemmed in by his fierce foes, the precipice her only possible retreat. Flashing a look of wild defiance from her beautiful black eyes, she sprang like a hunted deer from the lofty cliff, only to be impaled on a score of spears upraised from the canoe below.

To our camp in this outlandish spot, John Broadbanks brought his wife and family that, together, we might share the invigorations and excitements of a glorious month in the wilds. On the evening of which I am thinking, we were shooting down at the Three Half-Moons. The entire party had been out in the boat all day and, after tea, the ladies had reminded us that the cupboard was as bare as old Mother Hubbard’s, John and I picked up our guns and set off for the spot at which rabbits were most likely to be found. The Three Half-Moons were hidden by a belt of bush far down in the hollow. The lagoon in the valley ran back into the scrub, forming three crescent bays, and on the green flats that intervened between swamp and forest, the rabbits loved to gambol. We treated the Three Half-Moons as a kind of emergency reserve. At ordinary times we never went near the place. It was convenient to have one spot at which, when the commissariat department was in desperate straits, we could rely upon finding a ready supply.

It was getting dusk and John and I were walking in silence side by side. It was understood between us that we took it in turns to fire. All at once I noticed the head of a rabbit, with ears erect, over the gnarled root of a tree on the fringe of the bush. It was John’s turn to fire; so, uncertain as to whether he also saw it, I touched his shoulder and glanced in the direction of the telltale ears. In a flash the roar of his gun reverberated through the valley and the rabbit frisked away into the under-growth.

‘You missed him!’ I said.

‘Nonsense!’ he exclaimed, rushing forward through the cloud of smoke. And, to my surprise, he held aloft the limp and lifeless form of the rabbit he had shot. The rabbit that caught my eye was not the rabbit at which he fired! He had not noticed mine ! I have often thought of it since. For, clearly,

  1. I have no right to assume that the things that.
I see are the things that other people see.

  2. I have no right to assume that the things that
other people see are the things that I see.

  3. I have no right to assume, because I see a
thing, that it is necessarily obvious to everybody else.

  4. I have no right to assume, because I do not see
a thing, that, therefore, nobody else can see it.

 My memory of the Three Half -Moons reminds me that, at the best, one man’s vision is a very fragmentary affair. I see a part, but only a part. John sees a part, but only a part. I miss the rabbit that he sees, and he overlooks the rabbit that catches my eye. It is at least possible that, had somebody else come with us, he might have noticed a rabbit that neither of us saw.

 I hear people complain of having ‘a blind spot.’ With all my heart I envy them. For I take it that they mean that they see the landscape as a whole but miss a detail here and there. My trouble is much more serious. I fasten my attention on a detail here and there and miss the landscape as a whole. This form of myopia, distressing as it is, is practically universal Mr. Arnold Bennett has a capital essay on Seeing Life. In the development of his argument Mr. Bennett tells of a London man who visited Paris, and of a Paris lady who visited London. The Londoner who visited Paris for the first time observed immediately that the carriages of suburban trains had seats on the roof like tram-cars. He was so thrilled by this remarkable discovery that he observed almost nothing else. This enormous fact occupied the whole foreground of his perspective. The French woman who went to London for the first time became the victim of a similar obsession; and, as Mr. Bennett says, no English person would ever guess the phenomenon which vanquished all others in her mind on that opening day. She saw a cat walking across a street! The vision excited her. For, in Paris, cats do not roam at large in public thoroughfares. And so, for the rest of his days, the Londoner spoke of Paris as a place where people ride on the tops of trains; and the French girl spoke of London as a place where cats roam at will about the public streets!

 Now this is no freak of Mr. Bennett’s fancy. It appears fantastic and grotesque; but it is no more fantastic and grotesque than life itself. Mr. Bennett speaks of Paris. Many of the most illustrious visitors who ever went to Paris made the same mistake as the man whom Mr. Bennett so tellingly depicts. We are all familiar with the descriptions of Paris which adorn our books of travel The vision of its boulevards and its buildings, its social gaiety and its historic grandeur flashes before our minds like a noble picture projected upon a screen. But who, on visiting Paris, sees all that? Who, on visiting any city, sees the city as the guide books portray it? Every man who goes to Paris sees a Paris of his own; every man who goes to London sees a London of his own. His imagination is captivated by some little thing that responds to some little taste within him. Here, for example, are a couple of naturalists in Paris! The one is John James Audubon, the American; the other is Frank Buckland, the Inspector of British Fisheries. Ask Audubon what he saw in Paris, and he says not a word about its historic architecture, its noble statuary, or its graceful boulevards. ‘The stock-pigeon’, he says, ‘roosts in the trees of the garden of the Tuileries in great numbers; blackbirds also do the same and are extremely noisy before dark; some few rooks and magpies are seen there also. In the Jardins or walks of the Palais Royal, common sparrows are prodigiously plentiful The mountain finch passes in scattered numbers over Paris at this season, going northerly.’ And so on. ‘Frank Buckland visited Paris’, his biographer, Mr. G. C. Bompas, tells us, ‘in May, 1858; and his notes differ widely from those of the ordinary tourist. They are all about rats and fish and lizards and frogs.’ This was Paris — to him!

 And the pity of it is that our view of people is as fragmentary as our view of places. We look at a man ; see something about him, assume that there is nothing more to be seen and construct a conclusion instantaneously. In one of his clever books, George William Curtis tells the tale of Tibottom’s spectacles. Tibottom had but to put on his spectacles and he saw men as nobody else saw them. He saw them summarized, epitomized, summed up and classified. Thus, donning his magic spectacles, he looked straight at a bustling man of affairs — a man who cared more for a dollar than for anything else on earth — and straightway, seen through Tibottom’s spectacles, the man became transformed into a crumpled, battered bill, of larger or smaller denomination. Now I do not know how Tibottom came by his magic glasses. And I do not care. They may have been picked out of the worthless assortment that, according to Oliver Goldsmith, Moses Primrose brought home from the fair — the gross of green spectacles for which he had exchanged the Vicar of Wakefield’s horse. I do not know.’ I only know that, wherever they came from, they will not help us. For, obviously, the view that they give is a wantonly distorted one. No man can, with justice, be summarized and classified as sharply as these spectacles do it. Man is essentially a mixture. ‘Our padre,’ Mr, G. A. Studdert Kennedy, makes one of his soldier-heroes say:

Our padre ’e says I’m a sinner,

   And John Bull says I’m a saint,

And they’re both of ’em bound to be liars,

   For I’m neither of them, I ain’t

I’m a man, and a man’s a mixture,

   Right down from ’is very birth,

For part ov ’im comes from ’eaven,

   And part ov ’im comes from earth.

There’s nothing in man that’s perfect,

   And nothing that’s all complete;

’E’s nubbat a big beginning,

   From ’is ’ead to the soles of his feet!

 That’s the worst of wearing Tibottom’s spectacles. The padre sees something unlovely in the man, and, putting on the spectacles, he recognizes in him a sinner — only that and nothing more. John Bull sees something heroic in the man, and, donning the spectacles, he recognizes in him a saint. But the man himself knows that they are both wrong. Each is the victim of the fragmentary view.

 The trouble would not be quite so distressing if I could exercise some discrimination as to the fragment that greets my vision. Down at the Three Half-Moons the malady did not betray itself in its most acute form. John saw a rabbit; I saw a rabbit; I did not see the rabbit that he saw; he failed to notice the rabbit that caught my eye. What did it matter? The rabbit that John shot amply compensated for the rabbit that eluded his observation. But it does not always work out quite so happily. I have an ugly habit, for example, of seeing the worst and missing the best. I would give all that I possess to be able to reverse the process. ‘And it came to pass,’ so says an ancient legend, ‘that Jesus arrived one evening at the gates of a certain city. And he sent His disciples forward to prepare supper, whilst he himself, intent on doing good, walked through the streets into the market place. And he saw at the corner of the market many people gathered together looking at some object on the ground. And he drew near to see what it might be. It was a dead dog with a halter round its neck, by which he appeared to have been dragged through the mire. A viler, a more abject, a more unclean thing never met the eyes of man; and those who stood by looked on with abhorrence. “Faugh,” said one, “it pollutes the air,” “How long,” asked another, “shall this foul beast offend our sight?” “Look at his torn hide,” cried a third, “one could not even cut a shoe out of it.” “No doubt,” broke in a fourth, “he has been hanged for stealing.”  And Jesus heard them, and, looking down compassionately on the dead creature, said, “Pearls cannot compare with the whiteness of his teeth!” And the people were filled with amazement; and they said, “This must be Jesus of Nazareth!”; and they were ashamed, and bowed their heads and turned away.’ Perhaps — who shall say? — perhaps if I cultivated the more intimate acquaintance of that divine Observer, I should soon find my present defect completely reversed. I should be blind to the faults of my friends and wonderfully quick to see their virtues.

 Perhaps ! But why should I leave the matter in the misty realm of mere conjecture? Why should I make it depend upon a perhaps? Let us turn from imagination to mathematics ! Let us suppose that I have a hundred friends. And let us suppose — to state the case as moderately as it can possibly be stated — that each of my hundred friends has ninety-nine bad points and one good one. If I could learn to focus my attention on the solitary virtue of each of my friends, and if I were to set myself, with diligent care, to emulate those lonely excellencies, I should soon possess the entire hundred, and should attain to perfection in no time.

 If only I had the eyes to see that galaxy of graces, and if only I had the heart earnestly to covet them! If I could learn to see the pearl-like teeth of the dead dog, and to miss everything beside. I should shed no more tears over my fragmentary vision. And a very skilful observer assures me that such a transformation is not impossible, John Burroughs, one of our most delightful naturalists, says that I may drill myself to see exactly what I wish to see; and that, after all, is the secret of all clear seeing. In his Locusts and Wild Honey, Mr. Burroughs says that the secret of observation lies in the habit of decisive gazing. ‘Not by a first casual glance, but by a steady, deliberate aim of the eye, are the rarest things discovered. You must look intently, and hold your eye firmly to the spot, if you are to see more than do the rank and file of mankind.’ It is worth trying.

 It was very humiliating for John Broadbanks and me to feel that, while we had each of us seen a rabbit, we had each of us missed one. Many a time, in the years that followed, we sat together on the rocks to which we moored our boat at Tomahawk Cove, and, glancing across the river at the massive form of Maori Leap, laughed long and loudly over our experience at the Three Half-Moons. The same defective and fragmentary vision may, however, betray me into blunders at which I shall never feel like laughing. Paul said so. ‘We look’ he says, ‘not at the things that are seen but at the things that are not seen, for the things that are seen are temporal, but the things that are not seen are eternal.’ To look at the things that are seen is a very paltry achievement. To see the things that are unseen is a triumph of the observer’s skill Since, therefore, my vision must needs be fragmentary, I can very well afford to miss the sordid as long as I gaze with open face on the sublime. But if I miss the things that are subtle and eternal, and only notice the things that are showy and temporal, there will be no laughter on my lips as I recite the story of my unpardonable stupidity.

F.W. Boreham.