The Postman

IT would undoubtedly have been better for Frank Lawton if he had never written his first story. However, he did write it, and he sold it. Not long after that he sold another one, and then he was licked. He gave up a perfectly good job, and moved out into the country to free-lance. For a while things went well enough, but then, for what reason I have no idea, his work began to fall off. He began getting rejections.

Of course, from the very start of his free-lance career, Lawton found himself very much concerned with the postman. He lived on an R. F. D. route, and this meant that the postman’s arrival in the morning was extremely inconsistent. Some mornings he arrived at ten, and sometimes it would be almost one o’clock in the afternoon. When this happened, Lawton would become increasingly restless as the morning wore on. By eleven-thirty it was utterly impossible for him to concentrate on what he was writing. Every quarter of an hour he would get up and go to look in his mail box on the theory that the postman might have gone by without his seeing him. This never happened, because his workroom window looked directly out on the road.

After he had looked in the box two or three times, he would go out on the road and gaze down it in the direction from which the postman came. There was a bend in the road, and, if the mail was very late, he would walk down to the bend. This permitted him to see about a quarter of a mile farther. He also took to inquiring in various neighboring houses whether the postman had come, and this, of course, annoyed the neighbors. It did n’t annoy them as much, however, as the postman’s tardiness annoyed Lawton — nor nearly as much as when there was n’t any mail on a particular day. When that happened he would get to imagining that his checks or his rejected stories had been lost in the mail. This — even imagining it — is the worst thing that can happen to a writer.

All this, of course, tended to prey on Lawton’s mind, and gradually led him to look on the postman as one who played a much more important part in his life than he actually did. A great many writers tend to become superstitious, and one of the reasons for this is that the things they write are sometimes accepted — or rejected — for causes which they themselves can’t figure out. Lawton came gradually to ascribe his failures and his successes to the postman.

When he ran into that first bad streak of rejections, he did n’t actually say or do anything to the postman; he merely thought, and cursed to himself. But as the days wore on he took inwardly to blaming him more and more. He came to hate the sight of the postman. Then, one day, Lawton’s luck changed. The postman brought him two splendid checks in the same mail. He had gone farther down the road, of course, before Lawton made the discovery, but Lawton waited until he passed by on his return journey, greeted him cheerfully, and invited him in for a drink. They had three, and parted in high mutual esteem.

Lawton’s luck held for a while, but of course he did n’t set the postman up to drinks every day. There had been some trouble when the fellow returned to the post office that day. However, Lawton greeted him kindly, and thought very highly of him. And to all who brought the subject up he warmly praised the efficiency of the United States Mails. The postman, at this time, in addition to bringing him good news, was bringing it at an early hour.

And then Lawton’s luck went bad again. This time it went very bad, and stayed bad. And at the same time the postman took to coming late. Lawton took it philosophically at first, and then he began to fret. Then he sulked. Then he fumed. He would stand up in the middle of his workroom, rip rejection slips from envelopes, and curse the postman out loud. And he began to imagine ludicrous things. He imagined that the postman bribed editors to turn down his stories. He even got to imagining that he stole rejection slips from editorial offices and put them in Lawton’s return envelopes himself. (It was an easy matter to persuade himself that the postman could counterfeit postmarks from distant cities.)

On one of those days when Lawton’s imagination was running especially wild, the postman returned him a story into which he had put everything he had. It was one that simply could n’t be turned down. It is really too bad about Lawton. He has to appear in court next week on a charge of assault and battery, and I myself really don’t see how he can explain it and make anybody understand. There is irony in it, too, because the plaintiff, right now, is Lawton’s best friend. He has accepted his last four stories.