Born on August 6, 1889, John Middleton Murry was pronounced
a beautiful baby, and good-looking he was always to be. Yet his very
face was a coincidentia oppositorum. Look at any portrait, or pen-por-
trait, of him in middle life. What have those large, luminous, contem-
plative eyes, so easily flooded with tears, to do with that combative
chin; those finely chiselled, fastidious lips with that coarse, thrice-
broken nose? Nowadays heredity is discounted, circumstance deemed
all-important: but if that chin was his father's so was the forcefulness it
betokened, and if those eyes were his mother's so was the sensibility.
What nature had proposed, no doubt, nurture disposed: but the traits
coexisted from the start -- and not always peacefully.

As the first son of an only son, he was naturally the apple of his
grandfather's eye. By this time, the shipwright had retired to a pub
in Bow Road, The Ordell Arms, and there the baby was taken to see
him. Once, when his aunt had gone off, first to fight somebody, then
to play tip-cat, leaving him squatting outside in the street, the old man,
outraged by such negligence, descended from on high like Jehovah
and felled her to the ground. His outbursts, both of fury and of
affection, however, were already nearing their end. It must have been
soon after this that the family were summoned to his deathbed:

I sat there, on a chest at the end of his bed, in a reefer coat with gold
anchor-buttons, staring at him, half-frightened . . . Everybody was sent
out of the room by a motion of his head, and I sat there alone, staring at
him with big eyes. Every now and then he would say something to me,
which I could not catch; it seemed to get lost in his bushy black beard, as
he struggled to lift himself to get a full sight of me. At last I understood
what he wanted and pulled a chair close to his bedside and perched myself
upon it. And we looked at one another. How long I sat there, looking at
him, he looking at me, I cannot say. I know it was a long time, and that
I was not tired. I know it was a long time, because I was dimly conscious
that the misgivings of my parents at leaving me alone with him, were
being increased into restiveness and anxiety by the length of my stay. But
they dared not interfere . . . They were afraid of the dying lion. I was
afraid, and not afraid. I knew him as a lion; but I knew also that he would
never dart his paw on me. And as I looked at him, and felt something of
the speech that was in his eyes when he looked at me, my little heart was
weh with a grief unspeakable. ¹

This was when Murry was three. Thenceforward, his glimpses of his
grandfather's world were few and fleeting. His gaze was turned, willy-
nilly, in quite another direction.

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