Summary
Inside the gas-lit caverns of a city that never sleeps, Jacob Spraggins—coal-dust Midas turned subway sultan—barters his last scrap of guilt for a ten-thousand-dollar absolution, only to discover that conscience, like a subway token, has a return trip. His largesse ricochets through tenement corridors, luxury parlors, and the clandestine whistle-codes of lovers, until the same banknotes that once greased a swindle now oil the hinges of a servant’s stairway to freedom. The film stitches O. Henry’s ironic patchwork into a flickering tapestry of class-masquerade: a delivery boy who refuses to be purchased, an heiress who scrubs her own silver, and a patriarch who learns that the cost of buying back one’s soul is the price of vinegar raised three cynical cents.
Synopsis
Jacob Spraggins, veteran general of a breaker-boy-to-multi-millionaire campaign, is driven by a troublesome conscience into the ranks of the amateur Haroun al Raschids, who infest Bagdad-on-the-Subway. Donations to hospitals, charities and universities fail to bring him happiness. At last he traces his uneasiness to a piece of legitimate business whereby he swindled one McLeod out of property worth ten thousand dollars. Detectives find the grandson of McLeod, a delivery youth for a large provision store. To him old man Spraggins hands ten thousand dollars in bills. Impressed by the young man's insouciant independence, the money monarch makes further advances, even hints at the possibility of matrimony between McLeod and his daughter, Celia. But Thomas McLeod is already engaged to a parlor maid at a house on his round. Neither he nor Spraggins has any idea that the parlor maid is Celia, who has fallen in love with Thomas's whistling. She whistles, and the accomplishment has helped her from the social life of her father's financial class. Aided and abetted by Annette McCorkle, the romantic housemaid, Celia has donned cap and apron and set out to be loved for herself alone. She has succeeded. So the ten thousand dollar benefaction, having brought peace to the soul of the Caliph, proceeds to bring happiness to McLeod and Celia as well, for their financial way to elopement is now clear, and they go. Mr. Spraggins gives chase, but, recognizing the prospective bridegroom, adds his blessing. It would seem so far that this one benefaction had failed to harm the Caliph-ridden populace of New Arabia. However, a year later old Jacob Spraggins orders all his donations to charities canceled. The working girls can continue to work for all he cares. The sun must shine on the Sunshine Fund without the aid of his money. Celia has a child. The child, Jakey, must have an unprecedented fortune by the time he attains twenty-one. So Mr. Spraggins raises the price of all vinegar three cents.
Moving Picture World, November 3, 1917
