



Produced by Don Kostuch. (This text was produced from files
obtained from The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)





[Transcriber's note: The original unedited text file came
from http://www.archive.org/details/nobody00jacogoog]


NOBODY

LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE




[Illustration: "Miss Manwaring! For the Love of Mike--"]





NOBODY

By LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE

AUTHOR OF "The Lone Wolf,"

"The Brass Bowl," "Cynthia of the Minute,"

"The Destroying Angel," Etc.





With Frontispiece

By W. L. JACOBS





A. L. BURT COMPANY

Publishers

New York

Published by Arrangement with GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY



Copyright, 1914,

By LOUIS JOSEPH VANCE

Copyright, 1915,

By GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

_This novel was originally published serially,
under the title of "An Outsider."_





CONTENTS

CHAPTER

    I  ANARCHY

   II  BURGLARY

  III  ACCESSARY AFTER THE FACT

   IV  BLACKMAIL

    V  CONSPIRACY

   VI  ALIAS MANWARING

  VII  FRAUD

 VIII  A THIEF IN THE NIGHT

   IX  PICAROON

    X  LEGERDEMAIN

   XI  THE THIRD DEGREE

  XII  MACHIAVELLIAN

 XIII  MARPLOT

  XIV  MAGIC

   XV  FALSE WITNESS

  XVI  THE PLANT

 XVII  EXPOSE

XVIII  BREAKING JAIL







NOBODY




CHAPTER I

ANARCHY



"What you gonna have?"

To this inquiry the patron made no response; head bent, nose between
the pages of the magazine, she pored sedulously over a legend attached
to one of the illustrations.

After a decent pause in waiting the waitress renewed her demand with a
sharper accent:

"Say, lis'en; what you want?"

"White satin, veiled with _point d' Angleterre_,'" Miss Manvers
replied distinctly, if without looking up, aware simply of something
imperative in the starched but humid presence at her elbow.

Pardonably startled, the waitress demanded with the rising inflection:
"_Wha-a-at?_"

"'The court train,'" Miss Manvers pursued in abstraction, "'is lined
with lace and dotted with bouquets of orange-blossoms--'"

She checked herself suddenly, looked up shyly, and essayed a pale,
apologetic smile.

"I'm sorry; I didn't realise--"

But now the waitress had caught a glimpse of the illustration and was
bending over the patron's shoulder for a better look.

"Gee!" she commented sincerely. "Ain't that a dream?"

"Yes," Miss Manvers admitted wistfully, "it's a dream, right enough!"

"That's so, too." Deftly, with a large, moist, red hand, the waitress
arranged knife, fork, spoon, and paper serviette on the unclothed
brown board before Miss Manvers. "That's the worst of them fashion
mag'zines," she complained; "they get your goat. Sometimes after
readin' some of that dope I can't hardly remember orders right, just
for wishin' somebody'd come along and hang some of them joyful rags
onto me!"

Then, catching the eye of the manager, she straightway resumed her
professional habit of slightly wilted hauteur--compounded in equal
parts of discontent, tired feet, heat-fag and that profound disdain
for food-consuming animals which inevitably informs the mind of every
quick-lunch waitress.

"What you gonna have?" she demanded dispassionately.

"Ham-and, please."

"Plate of ham-and. Cawfy?"

"Yes, iced coffee and"--Miss Manvers hesitated briefly--"and a
napoleon."

Reciting the amended order, the waitress withdrew.

For the next few moments the customer neglected the fashion magazine
which she had found--apparently a souvenir of some other
absent-minded patron--on the seat of the chair next that one of her
own casual choice.

She stared blankly at the smudged and spotted bill of fare propped up,
in its wooden frame, against an armour-plate-china sugar-bowl. She was
deeply intrigued by the mystery of human frailty as exemplified by her
reckless extravagance in ordering that superfluous bit of pastry. Miss
Manvers's purse contained a single coin of silver, the quarter of a
dollar; being precisely the sum of her entire fortune. Her ham and
beans would cost fifteen cents, the coffee and the napoleon five cents
each. In other words, she would be penniless when she had paid her
score--and Heaven only knew for how long afterward.

Her lips moved without sound in her worn and pallid face. "What's the
difference?" she bully-ragged her conscience. "I might as well be
broke as the way I am!"

The argument was painfully reasonable; that inmate of New York
who has but five cents has nothing.

On the other hand, there was nothing whatever to be advanced in
extenuation of her folly in thus inviting indigestion--a passion for
pastry is its own punishment no less than any other infatuation to
which mortal flesh is prone. Sally was morally certain she would
suffer, and that severely, before nightfall.

"Well, what of it?" she grumbled sullenly. "If I die for it, it's
cheap at the price! And, no matter what happens, it can't be any
hotter afterward than it is now."

Somehow soothed by this cynical reflection, she sat up, mopped her
flushed forehead with a handkerchief of which she was not proud, and
drank thirstily of her tumbler of ice-water.

The grateful draft reminded her that she had actually been athirst
ever since noon. It was now almost three o'clock--thanks to which fact
she might eat in the comparative comfort of a lunchroom which boasted
no patron other than herself. But she was little appreciative of this
boon; she comprehended her surroundings with just a little languid
resentment of their smug cleanliness and their atmosphere impregnated
with effluvia of cheap edibles. But if these seemed offensive she
would have been willing to overlook them on certain
conditions--as she proved when the waitress reappeared with her order.

"I don't suppose--" Miss Manvers began, but hesitated.

"What say?"

"I don't suppose you need any more girls here?"

"Lookin' for a job?" the waitress inquired brilliantly. "I dunno--I'll
ask the manager, if you want."

Miss Manvers nodded a barely audible "Please!" She munched drearily
for a few minutes, staring out through the front windows wherein, from
dawn till dark, a white-clad chef industriously browned the wheats and
cast sinkers; beyond their wide expanse of plate-glass, stenciled with
the name of the establishment in reverse, a vista of sun-smitten
street danced drunkenly through the reek from the sheet-iron griddles.
Miss Manvers wondered dully if the sidewalks were really less hot than
those same griddles.

"The manager says nothin' doin'," the waitress reported. "But you can
leave your name and add-ress if you wanta."

"Thanks," said Miss Manvers; "but what's the use?"

"That's right, all right," the other sympathised. "Besides, take it
from me, this ain't the kind of a job you could make good at. You
gotta be a horse like me to stand it,'specially days like this."

"Yes, I was thinking of that--"

"Believe me or not, nobody ain't got no idear what hot is without
they've juggled hash in one of these joints on a summer day. The
kitchen back there is honest' somethin' fierce. Three of our girls
fainted dead away in the noon rush."

"Oh, I know," Miss Manvers sighed; "I've tried it before--and failed."

The entrance of another customer prevented further confidences, and
Miss Manvers was left to resume her scanning of the fashion magazine.

If its distracting quality was unquestionable, it hardly contributed
comfort to her mood.

"In selecting her personal apparel," she read, "the bride-to-be must,
of necessity, be guided by individual requirements and the social
position which she is to assume. Although much has been said about the
advisability of purchasing only what is really needed and can be worn
before the styles change, it is a common fault of brides to buy too
much.... It is assumed that the June bride will have already on
hand a suit or two, a one-piece frock of serge or similar material, a
top-coat, an afternoon coat or one of the new capes, evening gowns,
and an evening wrap, one or two afternoon and luncheon frocks,
and hats, shoes, and similar accessories...."

Here Miss Manvers withdrew from the printed page long enough mentally
to inventory her own wardrobe.

"That lets me out," she said, and turned a page.

The caption, "A Feudal Aristocracy," caught her attention. "Long
Island," she learned, "is a poem itself to-day, even if it is
suffering from cheap developments, the encroachment of tenantry, and
the swarming of the commuters. It is too bad that this garden spot
must be overrun, and indeed there has been a movement to stay the tide
of immigration from the city. In one section our best people are
buying up vast stretches of property to add to their private estates.
..."

Fascinated, Miss Manvers thrust aside a garnished plate, took a gulp
of the decoction called coffee, and attacked her napoleon.

"I am so glad," she continued to read, "to see that we are adding to
our estates and fast forming an aristocracy of the countryside; we
really live at our country places now for over half the year. Even the
large weddings are no longer town affairs. If one has an estate it is
so much smarter now to marry off one's daughters from the country
place. Yet there is always one difficulty about this method of
procedure: can such weddings be afforded the prominence
necessary? Weddings, of course, must be given a certain amount of
advertisement, through the proper channels, because each of us stands
for a representative house, which must not drop into oblivion...."

At this point Miss Manvers wrinkled her nose indignantly. "Just for
that," she informed the unknown author of this artless screed, "just
for that now, I've a great mind not to go to Long Island at all this
summer--not even once to Coney!"

She turned impatiently back to the advertising pages and reviewed the
"classified wants" listlessly, forewarned by experience that they
would offer no invitation to one of her singularly modest
accomplishments; none of these advertisers desired the services of a
saleswoman, a typist, or even a lady's-maid. Not that Miss Manvers
imagined she would score a success in the role of lady's-maid, though
it was almost the only means open to her of earning a livelihood
which, thus far, she had not essayed.

Such work was hardly calculated to suit a girl with a mind of
independent cast and what is known as a temper of her own: prohibitive
barriers between her and such bread as may be earned in the sweat of
domestic servitude.

Little disappointed, then, she turned attention to "Chat of the Social
World," gossip which exercised potent fascination upon the girl's
intelligence. She devoured with more avidity than she had her
food those pretentiously phrased chronicles of the snobocracy--trite
announcements of post-season luncheons, dinners, dances, and bridge
parties; of departures for Europe and for American country homes, of
engagements and of weddings--distilling therefrom an acid envy that
robbed her napoleon of all its savour.

Such was the life for which she yearned with every famished aspiration
of her being. And why not? Who were these whose half-tone portraits
smirked complacence or scowled disdain to her inspection--who were
these that they should enjoy every good thing in life while she must
go hungering all her days for a little pleasure? Scarce one betrayed
by feature or expression either breeding or intelligence superior to
that of Sally Manvers, late of the hardware notions in Huckster's
Bargain Basement!

Regarding the full-page reproduction of a photograph showing a
jibber-jawed June bride in full regalia, Miss Manvers was moved
enviously to paraphrase an epigram of moot origin: "There, but for the
grace of God, stands Sally Manvers!"

There was enough truth in that to excuse a little gulp of emotion;
which, however, was craftily dissembled.

In due course, rising, Miss Manvers stood and delivered at the
desk of the blond cashier, then, penniless, wandered forth into the
brutal sunshine.

Her homeward way took her up Sixth Avenue, through Thirty-Fourth
Street, and northward on Park Avenue.

She went slowly, wearily, as suited a drudge to whom respite from
drudgery brought no earnest of ease or pleasure. The burning air beat
up into her downcast face from sun-baked stones that scorched through
the soles of her shoddy shoes, and she gulped down acrid mouthfuls of
it rather than breathed.

June was still young, but already summer, like some burly ruffian
shouldering spring aside with her work half done, held the city in the
hollow of a hot and humid hand.

In the mid-afternoon glow, lower Park Avenue owned its personal
atmosphere of somnolent isolation, in strong contrast with the bustle
of proletarian Fourth Avenue at its one extreme and the roar at the
other of traffic-galled Forty-Second Street. Of the residences a few,
whose awninged windows resembled heavy-lidded eyes, overlooked
wayfaring folk with drowsy arrogance; the greater number, with boarded
doors and blinded windows, like mouths and eyes tight shut in
seasonable slumber, ignored the world entirely.

Though she had passed that way twice a day for years on
end--always in consciousness of that aloof spirit informing the
inanimate, and in such resentment thereof as properly rewarded a
studied insolence--never before to-day had Sarah Manvers found the
genius of the neighbourhood so unmitigatedly intolerable. It was with
downright relief that presently she turned from the avenue eastward
and accomplished in the span of one short cross-town block a transit
of the most violent contrasts, from the dull dignity of the socially
eligible, if somewhat _passe_, through a stratum of shabby gentility,
to a region of late years dedicated to the uses of adversity
undisguised.

A few doors short of Lexington Avenue she paused, sighed, turned,
climbed weather-bitten steps to a brownstone entrance, and addressed
herself to three long flights of naked stairs.

She left behind, at the entrance, the dingy parlours of "Mme. Levin,
Modes et Toilettes," on the first landing the wailing-rooms of a
hag-ridden teacher of vocal culture, on the next several dusty
chambers perennially unrented, and gained at the top an open door
whose panels sported a simple rectangle of cardboard advertising the
tenancy of (in engraved script) _Miss Lucy Spode_, (in ink) _M. A.
Warden_, and (in pencil, a scrawl) _Manvers_.

Through this the girl walked into a back room of generous size, which
boasted a top-light together with the generic name of studio, and
was furnished with an ill-assorted company of lame and dismal pieces.
The several vocations of its tenants were indicated by a
typewriting-machine beneath a rubber hood thick with dust, a folding
metal music-stand and a violin-case, and a large studio easel
supplemented by a number of scrubby canvases. A door in the partition
wall communicated with a small bedchamber of the kind commonly termed
"hall room." And in one corner a stationary wash-stand and a gas-stove
for morbid cookery lurked behind a Japanese screen of dilapidated
panels.

Near the windows, on the end of a box-couch, a young woman was
perched, thin shoulders rounded over the ink-stained drawing-board
resting on her knees. She had a large, self-willed mouth and dark
Bohemian hair, and wore a dreary cotton kimono over a silk petticoat
whose past had been lurid. One hand clutched gingerly a bottle of
India ink, the other wielded a scratchy steel drafting-pen.

Interrupted, she looked up with a start that all but spilled the ink
and cried in a voice heavily  with the enervating brogue of
the Southern born:

"My land, Sally! _What_ time is it?"

In the act of unpinning her hat (a straw that even a drowning woman
would have hesitated to grasp at) Miss Manvers paused to consult an
invalid alarm-clock which was suffering palpitations on an
adjacent shelf.

"Twenty past three," she reported, sententious.

The artist cocked her head, squinted malevolently at her drawing,
dipped, and busily scratched once more.

"Scared me," she explained: "coming home so early!"

Sally removed her collar with a wrench and a grunt: "Got a date?"

"Sure; with Sammy--four o'clock."

"Salamander stuff, eh?"

"What do you want--a day like this? I'm half-cooked already, and I
guess I can go through a little fire for the sake of a sixty-cent
_table d' hote_ and a trip to Coney. But you needn't worry; it'll be
hotter than this before Sammy warms up enough to singe anything. His
intentions are so praiseworthy they pain him; he blushes every time he
has to recognise the sex question long enough to discuss the delights
of monogamy in a two-family house within commuting distance of
Prospect Park South."

"You don't mean to say you've got that far along--already!"

"That's the reward of a year's steady angling, honey."

"Heavens, but how