He convalesced at leisure all the way from Australia to Cape Town; and would have been all right; but somebody shot at somebody else one evening, and got Clive. So it was several months more before he arrived in India, and the next year before he had enough of China.
But Clive had seen many things in those two years and had learned fairly well the lesson of his own unimportance in a world which misses no man, neither king nor clown, after the dark curtain falls and satiated humanity shuffles home to bed.
He saw a massacre—or the remains of it—where fifteen thousand yellow men and one white priest lay dead. He saw Republican China, 40,000 strong, move out after the banditti, shouldering its modern rifles, while its regimental music played "Rosie O'Grady" in quick march time. He saw the railway between Hankow and Pekin swarming with White Wolf's bloody pack, limping westward from the Honan-Anhui border with dripping fangs. He peered into the stinking wells of Honan where women were cutting their own throats. He witnessed the levity of Lhasa priests and saw their
grimy out-thrust hands clutching for tips beside their prayer-wheels.
In India he gazed upon the degradation of woman and the unspeakable bestiality of man till that vile and dusty hell had sickened him to the soul.
Back into Europe he drifted; and instantly and everywhere appeared the awful Yankee—shooting wells in Hungary, shooting craps in Monaco, digging antiques in Greece, digging tunnels in Servia,—everywhere the Yankee, drilling, bridging, constructing, exploring, pushing, arguing, quarrelling, insisting, telegraphing, gambling, touring, over-running older and better civilisations than his own crude Empire where he has nothing to learn from anybody but the Almighty—and then only when he condescends to ask for advice on Sunday.
And Clive, nevertheless, longed with a longing that made him sick, for "God's country" where all that is worst and best on earth still boils in the vast and seething cauldron of a continent in the making. There bubbles the elemental broth, dregs, scum, skimmings, residue, by-products, tailings, smoking corruption above the slowly forming and incorruptible matrix in its depths where lies imbedded, and ever growing, the Immam, the Hope of the World—gem indestructible, pearl beyond price. Difficilia quae pulchra.
And once, Clive had almost set out for home; and then, grimly, turned away toward the southern continent of the hemisphere.
In Lima he heard of an expedition fitting out to search for the lost Americans, Cromer and Page, and
for the Hungarian Seljan. And that same evening he met Captain Dane.