Summary
A jilted swell, adrift in a city that yawns at despair, stages his own extinction like a slapstick auteur—noose, river, pistol, oncoming train—yet every exit is a trapdoor back to the same greasepaint existence. His bungled suicides land him in a cell whose iron bars frame not doom but a proscenium: enter a golden-haired philanthropist with the gaze of a Medici and the purse of Croesus, who purchases his freedom and installs him as butler in her marble menagerie. There, amid bell-pulls and silver salvers, he becomes both spectator and spectacle, foiling a rival suitor’s midnight farce while wearing white gloves and the grin of a man who has forgotten he once wanted to die. Fortune, ever the ironist, then bequeaths him seven figures and the mistress of the house, turning the erstwhile suicide into the master of a mansion where every mirror now reflects the joke: death refused him, but life—absurd, lavish, matrimonial—finally said yes.
Synopsis
The hero, jilted by his best girl, tries various methods of getting rid of life, but is frustrated at every turn. Finally he lands in jail and is noticed by a pretty philanthropist who gives him the position of butler in her home. After various amusing incidents in connection with a call by one of the girl's admirers, the butler suddenly finds himself heir to a million dollars and wins his benefactress for his wife.
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