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Perplexed
    MEANWHILE, in the chair at the monthly meeting of the Personal Service Committee of the Hudley Council of Social Welfare, Henry Clay Crosland fingered his watch and sighed. The secretary had a pile of case papers still before him; alas, there were only too many necessitous cases—tuberculous daughters, new dentures, prolonged convalescences, widows with four children—requiring help under the pressure of unemployment in Hudley just now. Henry Clay Crosland did not grudge the time spent on them in the least; but he felt old and tired, and wished the meeting could finish rapidly, so that he could get home and have a snatch of dinner before returning to Hudley to preside at a meeting of the Hospital Board.
    The delay was partly his own fault, of course, for arriving at the meeting late. It was rather tiresome of Elaine to have run off with the car like that, and left him stranded for a quarter of an hour outside Tasker’s mill, looking forlorn and in need of rescue. No, no, not tiresome; Henry Clay Crosland corrected himself rapidly, and from force of habit found an indulgent smile for the caprices of youth—not tiresome; a little thoughtless possibly. It wouldn’t have mattered in the least if the mill had belonged to anybody but Tasker. If he had been stranded on the steps of almost any other mill in the West Riding, he would have gone back to their office and waited, cheerfully enough. But he couldn’t bring himself to do that to Tasker; he couldn’t endure to solicit even a chair from that man. Tasker! Mr. Crosland, restless in his chair, wished with all his heart that he had never had dealings withTasker; wished he had never sold him a single pound of yarn. But times were bad; even the great Crosland Spinning Company found them bad, “felt the draught” a little; and Tasker’s orders inspired confidence by their very size—he was in the habit of ordering enormous weights of yarn of one shade; a very tempting proposition. At first all had gone well, and Henry Clay Crosland had congratulated himself on having secured this magnificent customer; but then Tasker’s payments had become irregular; he had missed last month’s settling day altogether; and now it looked very much as if he were going to miss the next twenty-fifth as well. “The spinner’s at the wrong end of the stick,” grumbled Mr. Crosland to himself, “You sell a man yarn, and deliver it to him; and he takes it, and makes cloth out of it, and you never see it again. If all goes well, he pays you for it on the twenty-fifth of the month, it’s true. But if he doesn’t—well, you may just whistle for the money. Now the finishers,” he thought, “they may have to wait six months to be paid, but at least they have the man’s cloth under their roof, and can hold it as security.” There were only two things he could do with Tasker, mused Henry Clay Crosland (taking the vote on whether to provide milk for the delicate baby of a large family, whose father had been out of work for two years, for three weeks or six); he could either decline to supply Tasker with any more yarn, and insist on the manufacturer paying his previous accounts—in which case Tasker would simply go bankrupt, and Crosland would secure perhaps a shilling in the pound of what was owed him—or he could trust him yet a few months longer, and hope that the slump would break and trade improve, and Tasker do so much business as to be able to pay his spinner in full.
    Mr. Crosland gave a sharp sigh as he reached these conclusions. It was easy enough to put the alternatives thus clearly, but not so easy to decide which course to choose; forthe one meant losing for certain all that Tasker now owed him, and the other meant risking a much larger sum in the hope of getting some of it back. He hated risks nowadays; he was getting old, he wanted peace and security, he was afraid when it came to taking a