‘As to your future plans?’ asked the reporter.  ’You mean to go back, I presume.’

’No; London for me, if I can find a corner in it.  I hold concessions in Matanga.’

‘The land needs development, of course.’

‘Machinery too; capital most of all.’

At the bookstall upon the platform Drake bought a copy of the Times, and whilst taking his change he was attracted by a grayish-green volume prominently displayed upon the white newspapers.  The sobriety of the binding caught his fancy.  He picked it up, and read the gold-lettered title on the back—­A Man of Influence.  The stall-keeper recommended the novel; he had read it himself; besides, it was having a sale.  Drake turned to the title-page and glanced at the author’s name—­Sidney Mallinson.  He flashed into enthusiasm.

‘Selling, eh?’

‘Very well indeed.’

‘Has it been published long?’

‘Less than three months.’

‘I will take it, and everything else by the same author.’

‘It is his first book.’

The stall-keeper glanced at his enthusiastic customer, and saw a sunburnt face, eager as a boy’s.

‘Oh!’ he said doubtfully, ’I don’t know whether you will like it.  It’s violently modern.  Perhaps this,’ and he suggested with an outstretched forefinger a crimson volume explained by its ornamentation of a couple of assegais bound together with a necklace of teeth.  Drake laughed at the application of the homoeopathic principle to the sale of books.

‘No, I will take this,’ he said, and, moving aside from the stall, stood for a little turning the book over and over in his hands, feeling its weight and looking incessantly at the title-page, wondering, you would say, that the author had accomplished so much.

He had grounds for wonder, too.  His thoughts went back across the last ten years, and he remembered Mallinson’s clamouring for a reputation; a name—­that had been the essential thing, no matter what the career in which it was to be won.  Work he had classified according to the opportunities it afforded of public recognition; and his classification varied from day to day.  A cause celebre would suggest the Bar, a published sermon the Church, a flaming poster persuade to the stage.  In a word, he had looked upon a profession as no more than a sounding-board.

It had always seemed to Drake that this fervid desire for fame, as a thing apart in itself, not as a symbol of success won in a cherished pursuit, argued some quality of weakness in the man, something unstable which would make for failure.  His surprise was increased by an inability to recollect that Mallinson had ever considered literature as a means to his end.  Long sojourning in the wilderness, moreover, had given Drake an exaggerated reverence for the printed page.  He was inclined to set Mallinson on a pinnacle, and scourge himself at the foot of it for his earlier distrust of him.  He opened the book again at the beginning, and let the pages slip across beneath his thumb from cover to cover; 413 was marked on the top corner of the last; 413 pages actually written and printed and published; all consecutive too; something new on each page.  He turned to a porter.