Innumerable jelly-fish spread and sucked together
again their transparent bodies, reaching down and round about them with
purple feelers. Now and then some almost imperceptible breath of wind
swayed the yacht's boom slowly forward against the loose runner and the
stay, lifted the dripping sheet from the water, and half bellied the
sail. Then the _Spindrift_ would press forward, her spars creaking
slightly, tiny ripples playing round her bows, a double line of oily
bubbles in her wake. Again the impulse would fail her, and she would
lie still among the palpitating jellyfish, perfectly reflected in the
water beneath her; but carried steadily on by the silent shoreward
swelling of the tide.
Major Kent sat at the tiller smoking. He was in that mood of vacant
obliviousness of the ordinary affairs of life which long drifting on
calm seas induces. The helplessness of man in a sailing-ship, when the
wind fails him, begets a kind of fatalistic acceptance of the
inevitable, which is the nearest thing to peace that any of us ever
attain. Indeed to drift along the tide is peace, and no conviction of
the inevitableness of the worries which lurk in ambush for us on the
land has any power to break the spell.
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