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Updated: June 10, 2025
One afternoon he took me with him into the Jewish quarter of Amsterdam, and threading his way without hesitation through its maze of unsavoury slums, paused before a narrow three-storeyed house overlooking a stagnant backwater. "The room I was born in," he explained. "Window with the broken pane on the second floor. It has never been mended." I stole a glance at him.
It was a tropically hot afternoon and they stood in deepest shadow. No one else was in Orchard Street that odd little backwater at the time, and they stood gazing upward intently and gave me not even a passing glance. But I knew one for the Oriental visitor of the morning, and despite broad noonday and the hum of busy London about me, my blood seemed to turn to water.
Nevertheless I do solemnly state that I had not the slightest idea where Brown was doing his bit in the war. I had last heard of him in France in the Naval Division. That we should both have travelled half across the world to meet with a crash in a backwater at Basra was one of the strangest freaks of fortune I have come across.
Tommy Luton's measles: the Quantocks' secret: Elizabeth's lover! And to think that I believed I was coming to a backwater." Georgie held up his picture and half closed his eyes. "I believe it's finished," he said. "I shall have it framed, and put it in my drawing-room." This was a trap, and Olga fell into it. "Yes, it will look nice there," she said. "Really, Georgie, it is very clever of you."
He saw the ropes running from boat to boat in straight lines and angles each rope a line of white fire. But there was one rope which was the master rope. He could see that rope. If he could pull it once, it was absolutely and mathematically certain that the disordered fleet would reassemble itself in the backwater behind the guard-tower.
Now his life had once more become a stagnant backwater, and as he stood on the street corner watching the tides of traffic sweep by, he asked himself despairingly how much longer he could endure to float about in the sluggish circle of his consciousness. The thought of self-destruction recurred to him; but again his flesh recoiled.
"Perhaps," said Thorndyke; and we both subsided into gloomy and silent reflection. The place was peaceful and quiet, as only a backwater of London can be. Occasional hoots from far-away tugs and steamers told of the busy life down below in the crowded Pool.
Then we managed to struggle into a sort of backwater at the side of the dais upon which an alleged string band was trying to make good, as the scornful Miss Josie remarked. "There's something wrong in this, Thorp," said Indiman to me, in an undertone. "Did you notice the stout man who stood immediately behind her?" "The chap with one ear a full size larger than the other? Yes, I did."
He tucked his fore-paws beneath his chin, and, with quick, free strokes of his hind-legs, dived deep to the very bottom of the backwater. Thence he made a circle of the little bay, and, floating up to the arch before his dwelling, sought the inner entrance, where, however, the ice had not yet melted.
Out of the stir and sweep of social life and duty, of official and political ambition-heart-hungry, for she had no child; heart-lonely, though she had scarce recognised it in the duties and excitements round her she had floated suddenly into this backwater of a motionless life in Hamley.
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