'You seem to think you couldn't get it taken up in your own country,' said Melmotte.
'There's not a doubt about getting it all taken up there. Our folk, sir, are quick enough at the game; but you don't want them to teach you, Mr Melmotte, that nothing encourages this kind of thing like competition. When they hear at St. Louis and Chicago that the thing is alive in London, they'll be alive there. And it's the same here, sir. When they know that the stock is running like wildfire in America, they'll make it run here too.'
'How far have you got?'
'What we've gone to work upon is a concession for making the line from the United States Congress. We're to have the land for nothing, of course, and a grant of one thousand acres round every station, the stations to be twenty-five miles apart.'
'And the land is to be made over to you,--when?'
'When we have made the line up to the station.' Fisker understood perfectly that Mr Melmotte did not ask the question in reference to any value that he might attach to the possession of such lands, but to the attractiveness of such a prospectus in the eyes of the outside world of speculators.
'And what do you want me to do, Mr Fisker?'
'I want to have your name there,' he said. And he placed his finger down on a spot on which it was indicated that there was, or was to be, a chairman of an English Board of Directors, but with a space for the name hitherto blank.
'Who are to be your directors here, Mr Fisker?'
'We should ask you to choose them, sir. Mr Paul Montague should be one, and perhaps his friend Sir Felix Carbury might be another. We could get probably one of the Directors of the City and West End. But we would leave it all to you,--as also the amount of stock you would like to take yourself. If you gave yourself to it, heart and soul, Mr Melmotte, it would be the finest thing that there has been out for a long time. There would be such a mass of stock!'
'You have to back that with a certain amount of paid-up capital?'
'We take care, sir, in the West not to cripple commerce too closely by old-fashioned bandages. Look at what we've done already, sir, by having our limbs pretty free. Look at our line, sir, right across the continent, from San Francisco to New York. Look at--'
'Never mind that, Mr Fisker. People wanted to go from New York to San Francisco, and I don't know that they do want to go to Vera Cruz. But I will look at it, and you shall hear from me.' The interview was over, and Mr Fisker was contented with it. Had Mr Melmotte not intended at least to think of it, he would not have given ten minutes to the subject. After all, what was wanted from Mr Melmotte was little more than his name, for the use of which Mr Fisker proposed that he should receive from the speculative public two or three hundred thousand pounds.