J. M. Barrie

“ Jasparin woke him to a sense of his peril and his importance. This boy or lad occupied a chamber in what is now, I think, Mr. Headlam’s house, which was part of the old meeting place of Pop (now more splendidly housed) , and he woke about midnight to find Hook sitting in his room. Addressed indignantly, the Solitary was meditating too profoundly to hear, and the boy was about to make another remark when he fell asleep again. He will never come nearer to being torn apart like a pair of shorts. How Hook obtained access to this room is not known. ”

“ The society consists of the 30 or so leading person in the school, who are chosen entirely on account of their mental equipment. The Pops are the chief sight of Eton, and parade on great occasions in sock and spat, arms linked, six or eight abreast, and two yards in front of the Sun and Moon.
Legend (always untrustworthy) says that Hook’s election was a great surprise to the other members, who alone have the right of voting, and that James must have manipulated the ballot-box. But even if so, what ardour to excel, how indomitable is the particle, man. ”

“ Now in my opinion Hook was a good Etonian though not a great one, and it is my more or less passionate desire to persuade you of this—to have Hook, so to speak, set up for good—that brings me here this afternoon in spite of my better judgment.
To prove my case I have of late been trying to collect facts regarding Hook’s early days, and it must be admitted that he is an Old Boy about whom Eton has preserved few traditions. We should not even know that he had been an Etonian but for the statement “Eton and Balliol” in a work that is probably largely unreliable. ”

“ Hook’s decease must have occurred not long after his last visit to Eton. I can find but the baldest references to it in the newspapers of the period, perhaps because obituary notices invariably begin “We regret to announce,” and I daresay no one quite liked to say that about James’s passing. One feared the worst when he ceased to send a greeting to the school, couched in the Latin tongue which had always been his custom, on the 4th of June. Gradually it became known that a little boy—his implacable enemy—had struck Hook from the lists of Man. ”

“ All these details I observed later in corroboration, but I knew him first as Hook by his extraordinary note of noblesse oblige. I do not merely mean that Etonian was written all over him: there was something even more than that, as if (may I venture) he was two Etonians rolled by the magnanimous Gods into one. In a word, the handsomest man I have ever seen. Though, at the same time, perhaps slightly disgusting.”
“The moon,” Mr. Jasparin continues, “Paused for a moment (which it so often seems to me to do over Eton, as if awaiting some singular transaction) . ”

“ The longest-living author of this work died in 1937, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 85 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works. ”