Arthur Stringer

“ As his parts grew smaller and smaller, his pay envelope, in turn, grew thinner and thinner But despair was unknown to Spindel. He still believed in the fairy outside the door. He still passed vaguely elated and optimistic among his old-time friends of the stage wearing the veiled smile of an adventurer who has learned the secret of some lost treasure.
"There's a guy they'll never grind down," said Gunderman's stage manager, as he watched Spindel one day pocket his rejected script and trudge smiling and undaunted down to Broadway. ”

“ It was the next day that Spindel began pawning things, surreptitiously taken from their dingy back room.
For some days he wandered about the city of direction looking for work, as destitute of direction as a lost child looking for home. Late in the afternoon of the fourth day he trudged back to his "studio," a little dizzy in the head and a little weak in the knees. But he wanted to make sure the canaries were fed. ”

“ He continued to mark time as a play-actor, bending his neck to the yoke for the sake of a small but ever assured weekly envelope.
It could be called nothing more titan marking time, for all his ardor, all his energy was now being poured into his own secret pursuits. He was now giving his time and thought to the writing of plays—magnificently planned dramas which, by some odd mischance, never saw the light of day, and laboriously conceived comedies which, unfortunately, no one ever heard of. ”

“ So Spindel took advantage of the holiday season and earned a few dollars as an extra ticket-taker in a 14th street moving picture house. The pay was not lordly: but his gas bills and his arrears of rent he could for the time ignore. Those more exigent claims which rose from the pit of the human stomach, however, could not be ignored. He also remembered that he had his wife and his two canaries to feed. He hated moving pictures; they were the darkest enemy of the artist. ”

“ Spindel was not essentially a man of letters. He prided himself on being one of the people. This claim was advanced, perhaps, in extenuation for of certain oddities of orthography, for to the end Spindel was always a little weak in spelling. ”

“ So be watched over his newborn play, and nursed it. and redressed it in epigram, and decorated it with a newer ribbon or two of fancy. Then he carried it off to the agencies and the managers' office, with the blind pride to of a mother carrying her first-born to a baby show. ”