Here we dropped anchor, and Charlie, who had some business ashore, proposed our landing with him; but here again our passenger aroused his suspicions--though Heaven knows why--by preferring to remain aboard. If Charlie has a fault, it is a pig-headed determination to have his own way--but our passenger was politely obstinate.
"Please let me off," he requested, in his most top-lofty English accent. "You can see for yourself that there's nothing of interest--nothing but a beastly lot of nigger cabins, and dirty coral rock that will cut your boots to pieces. I'd much rather smoke and wait for you in peace;" and, taking out his case and lighting a cigarette, he waved it gaily to us as we rowed off.
He had certainly been right about Behring's Point--Charlie was absurdly certain that he had known it before, and had some reason for not landing--for a more forlorn and poverty-stricken foot-hold of humanity could hardly be conceived; a poor little cluster of negro cabins, indeed, scrambling up from the beach, and with no streets but craggy pathways in and out among the grey clinker-like coral rock.
But it was touching to find even here that, though the whole worldly goods of the community would scarcely have fetched ten dollars, the souls of men were still held worth caring for--one handsome youth's contempt notwithstanding--for presently we came upon a pretty little church, with a schoolhouse near by, while from the roof of an adjacent building we were hailed by a pleasant-faced white man, busy with some shingling.
It was the good priest of the little place, Father Serapion, disguised in overalls and the honest grime of his labour; like a true Benedictine, praying with his strong and skilful hands. He was down from his roof in a moment, a youngish man with the face of a practical dreamer, strangely happy-looking in what would seem to most an appalling isolation; there alone, month after month, with his black flock. But evidently his was no such thought, for he showed us with pride the new schoolhouse he was building out of the coral limestone with his own hands, as he had built the church, every stone of it, and the picturesque well, and the rampart-like wall round the churchyard. His garden, too, he was very proud of, as he well might be, wrested as it was out of the solid rock.