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In France, what are called ports are all alike, nasty narrow holes, only to be entered at certain times of tide and certain winds; made up of basins and back-waters, custom-houses, and cabarets; just fit for smugglers to run into, and nothing more; and, therefore, they are used for very little else.
In every direction, as he leaned over Ambrosden Avenue, as he looked down Francis Street to right and left, everywhere nothing of the streets was visible under the steadily moving pavement of heads. Every space between the tall houses resembled the flow of an intricate stream, with its currents, its eddies, its back-waters, beneath the clear radiance of the artificial light.
The life had probably not been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the green fish-pond between the yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and Mary Boyne had felt from the first the occasional brush of an intenser memory.
Like most of the northern rivers, it is a torrent stream, whose bed is insufficient to carry off its waters during the flooded season, causing the formation of lagoons, back-waters, and ana-branches, and yet in the dry months, containing only a thread of water trickling along a waste of sand, sometimes three or four hundred yards wide, and at intervals loosing itself and running under the surface.
The river was very beautiful; it ran between banks of willows and alders where loosestrife and meadowsweet and willow-herb and yarrow grew tall and thick. There were water-lilies in shady back-waters, and beautiful gardens sloping down to the water. At last the boats came to a pretty little town among trees. "This is where we disembark," said the little girl cousin.
And suddenly one leaves the crowd and the turbid air for one of those quiet corners that are like the back-waters of the bazaars, a small square where a vine stretches across a shop-front and hangs ripe clusters of grapes through the reeds.
He here engaged a boat with two cabins of matting, one in the prow and the other in the stern. She was built of planks sewn together in a very bungling manner. A labyrinth of creeks, back-waters, and channels spreads over the whole of this country, affording water-communication in all directions.
The other was what you may call the regular water pirate. They lived on the islands, in among the back-waters, or where-ever thar might be a patch of raised ground among the swamps, and had boats; and they would attack you at night as you war dropping down the stream or poling up the backs. They war wuss nor the others.
Not the shape which clothes its diseased body in soiled robes of imitation something at one and elevenpence three farthings per yard, and under ferns in conservatories, in punts up back-waters, in stifling tea-rooms, hotels, theatres and night-clubs, exchanges sly look for sly look and soiled mouth for soiled kisses, in its endeavours to pass itself off as that wonder figure which, radiant of brow and humorous of mouth, deep of breast and profound of thought, stands motionless in high and by-ways with hands outstretched to those futile figures, blindly hurrying past the Love they fondly imagine is to be found in the front row of the chorus, the last row of the cinema, or the unrestrained licence of the country house.
"Pardon me, my dear Judith," said I. "But this is a story lying somewhat up one of the back-waters of history. Where did you come across it?" "I saw it the other day in a French comic paper," replied Judith. I really don't know which to admire the more: the inconsequent way in which the French toss about scholarship, or the marvellous power of assimilation possessed by Judith.
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