The Day of Days (1914)

Cyril Scott, the eminent romantic actor, who won such sensational success in the stellar roles of "The Prince Chap," "The Lottery Man," and other dramatic triumphs, is ideally cast in "The Day of Days" as a young bookkeeper named Perceval, who has led an uneventful life until fate chooses him as the central figure in one of the strangest plots ever woven about the life of the metropolis. Perceval finds himself in the midst of a series of thrilling episodes that take him from the lowly earth to the high peaks of romance. Louis Joseph Vance based his exciting novel on Oriental fatalism, which assigns to every man his "day of days," wherein he shall range the skies and plumb the abyss of his destiny, alternately its lord and slave. In the course of the story, Perceval becomes the hero of a chain of fantastic and fascinating adventures, aids an heiress to escape a villain, finds a card in the villain's hat that sends him to a notorious gambling house, where he breaks the bank, and where, later, an attempt to rob him is frustrated by a timely raid. He effects his escape from the gambling house in the clothes of one of the officers, finds himself in a woman's bedroom, explains his presence by telling her he is after a burglar, his uniform corroborating the story, breaks away and turns up again in a secret dive of the underworld, re-escapes in time to discover the villain's plot to abduct the heiress, confronts the villain in disguise at a fancy ball, rescues the heiress a second time, becomes involved in a fight with the villain's hired gunmen, forces his way into a garage, dashes through the garage doors with the heroine in his arms, makes his way to an automobile and liberty, and in the final chapter thwarts the villain's schemes by marrying the heiress, just as the clock denotes the end of his "Day of Days." The story gets down to the heart of New York, and feels the pulse of the metropolis throughout.