After Five

Summary

Manhattan’s gas-lit twilight hums with the hush of ticker-tape prophecy when Ted Ewing—lanky, velvet-cravated, eyes flickering like a nickelodeon bulb—becomes both jailer and worshipper to Nora Hildreth, a porcelain heiress whose fifty-thousand-dollar patrimony he has folded into the maw of a Wall Street beast. Believing the beast has devoured principal and pride, Ted drafts a Faustian ledger: his own extinction, dressed as mishap, will refill her coffers via a freshly inked life-insurance parchment. Enter the S.S.S., a clandestine syndicate whose calling cards are shadows and whose currency is dread; they accept commission on his mortality with the politeness of pallbearers. Yet the market, capricious demiurge, doubles the stake overnight, turning grief into glut while the contract remains wet. Now the suitor who courted death must jilt her, but the syndicate, his Japanese valet, and the iron clause of suicide-exclusion tighten like silken garrotes. Cue a nocturnal ballet of forged telegrams, switched railway trunks, chloroformed doppelgängers, and a climactic rooftop where moonlight, gun-smoke, and wedding veils converge in one breathless iris-out.

Synopsis

Ted Ewing, a young New Yorker, is the guardian of Nora Hildreth, with whom he is in love. He invests her fortune of $50,000 and an equal amount of his own money (constituting almost his entire property) in a stock exchange speculation. When this speculation apparently fails he seeks to reimburse the girl by taking out a life insurance policy in her favor and then killing himself. But, as the policy has a clause invalidating it in case of suicide, he has to arrange an "accidental death" for himself, and, to this end, enters into an arrangement with the chief of the S.S.S., a blackmailing society which has already threatened his life. The humorous complications really begin when it develops that the money has not been lost but doubled, so that Ted, instead of wishing to die, has every reason imaginable for wishing to live. It is, however, almost impossible to break his sworn pact with the S.S.S. and his own Japanese valet, to whom he gave the money to pay for his death, refuses to divert the money from the one use to which it has been pledged. The manner in which Ted manages to escape from his own plots against his own life, and the details of his romance with Nora form the concluding episodes of this highly amusing photodrama.