“Oh, once in a blue moon! Moon was blue yesterday. Somebody gave me this tip last night, and I had a shy.”
“I didn’t shy,” said Jim. “Rather a pity. Twenty-five to one, wasn’t it?”
“Yes; that fiver of mine will go a long way,” said Harry. “Come and dine to-night. Dora and Claude Osborne are coming.”
“Thanks awfully, but I’m engaged,” said Jim.
He went back to his flat when the last race was recorded to see just where he stood. He had nothing more on for the last day of the meeting, and thus his accounts were ready to be made up. A rather lengthy addition, with a very short subtraction of winnings, showed him just what he had lost. And he owed nearly five hundred pounds more than he could possibly pay. The exact sum was £476. It would have to be paid by Monday next.
It was true in a sense, that, as he told Harry Franklin, he was engaged that night, though the engagement was to himself only. It was necessary to sit and think. The money was necessary to him, and necessity is a lawless force. The money had to be obtained; so much might be taken for granted. It was no use considering what would happen if it was not obtained; therefore, all that might be dismissed, for it had to be obtained. That was the terminus from which he started.
He had telephoned from the club that he would be in for dinner, and would dine alone, and Claude’s admirable cook, it appeared, understood the science of providing single dinners as well as she understood more festive provisions. Dinner was light and short, and Parker, without prompting, gave him a half-bottle of Veuve Clicquot, iced to the right point and no further, and a glass of port that seemed to restore him to his normal level. What he had to face was no longer unfaceable; he felt he could go out and meet necessity.
Other possibilities detained him but little; it was no use applying to his mother for money, for he might as well apply to the workhouse; and he could not apply to the Osbornes. He tried to think of himself asking Claude to lend him this sum; he tried to picture himself going to Lord Osborne with his story. But the picture was unpaintable: it had no possible existence.
And the other way—the way which already had taken form and feature in his mind—was not so difficult, far less impossible of contemplation, simply because his nature was not straight, and the moral difficulty of stealing appeared to him to be within his power to deal with. He had never been straight; but even now he made excuses for himself, said that it was a necessity that forced him into a path that was abhorrent to him. Perhaps he did dislike it a little; certainly he did not take it for amusement. Simply there was no other way open to him. There remained only to consider the chances of detection. They did not seem to him great. The cheque-book with which he would shortly be concerned had clearly been left in its drawer as finished with, for the last cheque was used, though not the one immediately preceding it. Claude, too, had almost bragged about his carelessness with regard to money, and the truth of his boast had been endorsed by his mother only two nights ago, when she told him how he had never noticed that his quarter’s allowance had not been paid in. That was a matter of nearly four thousand pounds; this of hardly more than the same number of hundreds.
Besides, it if were detected, what would Claude do? Proceed against his wife’s brother? He believed he need not waste time in considering such a possibility, for, to begin with, the possibility itself was so remote.