Page:JMBarrie Hook at Eton 1925.djvu/9

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

- 9 -

their sons to them. Frequently, owing to trouble with scholarships, they are not able to carry out this ambition, but, if they are of the bull-dog breed and have a competency, they often do go back and settle down there, with this sentiment for Eton as their profession, living a goloshes life and trying to think that they are still happy little scugs. They have a club, the Buttery (formerly Jordan's), and form perhaps one of the most charming of all exclusive coteries.

Mr. Jasper writes that on that evening he was walking to the club in Keate's Lane from his lodging at Windsor (which he has furnished exactly like an Eton room, with picture of a huntsman falling into a stream, a folding bed and a hat-box for the surreptitious concealment of coal). The evening was not wet but the trees were dripping, and he was in a dejected mood because it was past the lock-up hour and he had still, alas, the right to be at large. "The street," he continues, "seemed to be deserted, but as I approached the passage leading to the present rooms of the Eton Society I was conscious of a shadowy figure sitting motionless on the college wall, the low wall on which none may sit save Pops. In a moment, incredible as it may seem, I knew that I was in the presence of Jas. Hook, I had never before seen him in the flesh (which indeed is an inadequate term for his earthly tenement). His appearance I knew only by a poster on the London Underground, and he was now dressed very differently, in the incomparable garb of Pop. On his head he wore an irreproachable silk hat,