When he reached the High Street, he stopped and considered.
There was a bank; he could apply there. Then there was a brewery. If these failed, there remained an insurance office.
These represented polite avocations.
There were shops in abundance, where men, better looking than he, smiled over counters, and carried parcels, and stood bare-headed on the pavement at carriage-doors. But Holdsworth was still too much the sailor at heart to tolerate the notion of shop-serving. He would start a little school rather than do that. And indeed school-keeping seemed more feasible than anything else. Mrs. Parrot’s lodgings would serve him there; boys would assemble by degrees; and he could set and hear lessons, and teach writing and mathematics, as well as any university man.
Meanwhile, let him try the bank.
It faced the market-place in the High Street, had a well-worn door-step and stout, noisy swinging doors. Holdsworth entered, and found himself in a badly-lighted office, with a counter across it, behind which were three or four clerks. A man who looked a fourth-rate farmer was paying money in, and whilst he counted a great accumulation of greasy silver, which he had discharged in company with a number of soiled, infragrant cheques out of a leather bag, he paused at every twenty to submit an observation of a rural nature to the intelligence of an elderly personage with long whiskers, and a somewhat Hebraical cast of visage, behind the counter.
The manager, for so the long-whiskered man was, observing Holdsworth to be a stranger, politely asked him his business.
“Can I speak to the manager?”
“Certainly, sir; I am the manager. Walk this way, please.”