Select Stories, March 1942 but even so, he might have been more sociable. “The Perfect Jinx!” the headlines named Instead, he gazed with those wistful, apologetic him—and they were right. eyes, and said nothing. I needed distraction, and here I was committed to carry a little wooden By Lawrence Treat puppet for two hundred miles. H E HAS to be somewhere. A slight, stoop- After a time, I became conscious of a straining shouldered little man, bald, subdued, and a concentration radiating from him, almost like meek, with thin delicate nostrils and a a new sound against the monotony of rain and quiet resignation in his brown eyes. He gives the motor and swishing tires. His fists were clenched impression of apologizing for himself, as if he had into little pink bows and his lips were knotted in a no right to be with you but just couldn’t resist the bud of repression. Suddenly, as we passed a cross temptation. He likes people, you see. road, he almost jumped out of his seat. If you ever come across anyone like that, ask his “That’s it!” he exclaimed. name. There’s always a chance it may be Bogan. “That’s what?” Harley Bogan. “The place where it started.” I’d been driving since eight that morning, and I I coaxed him with a “Yes?” and waited. I could wanted company. The rain was slapping like a feel him fighting it, the story he didn’t want to tell miniature barrage on the windshield and the wiper lest I throw him out in the rain. And for good blades couldn’t click fast enough. The tires were reason, too. making a steady swish and I could see their gray But it had to come, and it did. In jerks, in sighs, disappearing tracks in the mirror. in dropped words as he tried to swallow it down. He was a forlorn, bedraggled figure standing “It was years ago,” he said. “I had a dog with under a tree at the top of the hill. He didn’t bother me. A little brown mutt that used to curl up around to thumb me. He simply stared, like a dog that my toes and keep my feet warm at night. I like wants to come inside the house and knows it can’t. dogs,” he added eagerly, “and I liked Lady So he stared, and I could feel the appeal in him. particularly.” He seemed tired and hungry and wet and I was He bit his lips and rubbed them with his fingers sorry for him, but a few minutes after I’d picked as if to massage back the tale, but it had started him up I began being sorry for myself. I spouted now and he was powerless. my piece about how I was on my way to Baltimore “I was standing there,” he continued, “hoping a for the trial flight of that new plane. My name truck or a wagon would come along. My clothes would be on the select passenger list and the were too ragged for anything else. I’d been publicity meant cash. I crowed too much, perhaps, sleeping in the fields, with Lady to keep my feet SELECT STORIES 2 warm. So when the big car came along I didn’t furnace flue that backed up. They blamed it on even get up. But Lady scampered out on the road Bogan, too. You see, he himself never suffered. It and I couldn’t help myself. I yelled and then I was always his companion, the other man in the dived for him and that’s all I remember. car. “I learnt later on that the fender had struck me I looked ahead. We were passing a desolate and the car had swerved and gone into a ditch. It’s stretch of swamp and I couldn’t put him out here. the only time in my life I was ever hurt. We were Not this mild meek little fellow who was pouring both rushed to the hospital and put in adjoining out his heart. But at the next town— beds. Me and Warrington Dodd. I wished I didn’t have that plane flight ahead of “I guess you’ve read about him. His genius for me. I slowed up. The road wasn’t slippery, but I the theatre, his knack of creating types. He could might blow a tire or hit an obstruction or have to reach into anybody, find an acting personality and jam on my brakes, and I didn’t want to take develop it. He did with me, though I’d never even chances. Not with Harley Bogan beside me. thought of the stage. I’d always had too many He began telling about the thing itself, the event things on my mind.” that had catapulted him into a fame so grotesque It was a peculiar remark and I followed it up. that it earned him a night club engagement where “What sort of things?” I asked. he was billed as “The Original Jinx: If You’re He muttered something that I didn’t catch. If I Superstitious, Don’t Come!” A bright idea, though had, I think I’d have stopped the car then and there it hadn’t worked out. and thrown him out. We were passing through a “With the play about to open,” he said docilely, collection of shacks that I suppose you could call a “I thought my luck had changed. I had a career and village, but it was such a poverty-stricken little a good job and Warrington Dodd. And I was in settlement that I doubt whether he could have hurt love.” it. I didn’t dare look. The pathos of his meek, “It was on account of a fly,” he said. “A fly that sensitive face would have been too much. lit on the end of my nose. My arms were strapped “She’s Libby Lubelle, of the movies,” he went down and I couldn’t brush the thing off. I sort of on. “But at that time she was just a dreamy, switched my nose, like this, and Dodd was ambitious little kid with a small part in the show. watching.” We were in love, and the day before the opening I looked. His brown eyes were sad, doleful, and we celebrated by going out to the country. But we when he moved the muscles at the side of his face, got drenched in the rain and caught cold, both of drawing up and distorting his mouth, the effect was us.” so horrific, so ineffably tragic, that I can still see it. I knew the rest of it. Bogan had played the Agony, grief, suffering—his face was the complete kindly old father, the defeated in life, and the expression. climax of the play was his reception of his His story began to wander, but the drift was wayward daughter. But as he stretched out his arm plain. Dodd regarded that accident as fate’s towards her, that first night, Fate dealt its master presentation of the born tragedian. Dodd offered stroke. him a part, taking him to New York, finding a play, He had acted smoothly, deftly, despite a slightly casting it, building up the publicity. hoarse voice. He reached his cue line, raised his With a shock, I remembered. Harley Bogan, the arms and extended them in a gesture of pardon. He perfect jinx. After the thing happened, he became a was about to speak. ten days’ sensation. The press publicized him as the His head lifted up, hesitated; his nostrils absolute in hard luck. Flood, earthquake, tornado twitched. Involuntarily Bogan opened his mouth dogged his path. Seventeen motor accidents, two and drew in his breath. Than his face contorted as train wrecks, a fallen elevator, a house that never before had been seen in the glare of collapsed. The list was prodigious and fantastic and footlights. His arms and body cried dramatically incredible and true. No one person could have “My daughter!” while the rest of him reacted to the survived it all. But Bogan had. overweening power of a mighty sneeze. I remembered the untimely end of Warrington For a second there was complete silence. Then Dodd. Asphyxiated by carbon monoxide from a someone in the front row tittered. The titter caught FORTUNE’S FADEAWAY 3 on, traveled through the house, swept to the rear of at all. It was she, watching from the wing. She the orchestra and bounded to the balcony. The sneezed.” wave rose, grew, reached the state of hysteria and I turned in amazement. I must have jerked the subsided to redouble in force. It ignored the fall of steering gear. Bogan yelled, pointed, and I yanked the curtain and dashed itself relentlessly against the at the wheel. asbestos drop. It roared steadily on, like some great But it was too late. The car was in a skid and headless monster reveling in its own decapitation. there was nothing to do but wait for the crash. And long after the miserable figure of Harley I was knocked unconscious. Not badly hurt, but Bogan had quit the theatre, the laughter-worn I’d lost my chance to reach Baltimore in time. And audience lifted itself weakly from its seats and left Bogan was gone. Somebody told me the little man the auditorium. It ruined the show and made had left uninjured and had said he was sorry. Bogan. Sorry! That plane trip meant about twenty- “If I could break my luck just once,” he said, thousand dollars to me, in publicity. “I’d be all right. But it’s always the other person, So, if you should ever come across a meek little and it scares me. Like Libby, that night. She could man with humble brown eyes, ask him if his name never have gotten over it if we’d married.” is Bogan. And if it is, tell him what a mascot he is. “She couldn’t?” I asked. “I don’t see how it Why? Don’t you remember that trial flight? It affected her.” ended in a crash, with all passengers killed—except “Without her,” he explained mildly, “everything me. would have been all right. You see, I never sneezed Bogan saved me.