Reactionary Old Fogy

FULL CARGO (369 pp.)--Wilbur Daniel Sfeele--Doubleday ($3.95).

Most modern short story writers like to keep their tales within easy commuting distance of everyday life. Not so, Wilbur Daniel Steele, 65, who rejoices in being a reactionary and flavorful old fogy. Like Conrad and Maugham, he prefers to clamp a character in the vise of a strange situation, watch him wriggle toward nobility, degradation, or death. At his best, Author Steele can stir a jigger of irony, a dash of adventure, a sprig of the exotic and a pinch of mystery into a tippling good yarn. At his worst, he makes the tricks of Fate look like the hoked-up tricks of the trade.

Full Cargo is a late sifting of good & bad Steele, 19 stories dating from 1918 to the present. Most of the stories have edge; some few also have point. Of these:

Two Seconds pulses with the same eerie beat as Poe's Tell-Tale Heart. Its hero is a brilliant young British scholar who has pushed himself into a shaky state of nerves, and taken ship for an American teaching post. At first, John Divine relaxes. During a session of shuffleboard in a heavy sea, Divine's eye roves toward the scuppers and the slit of open space under the lifeboats. In that instant, he sees "a billowing of pink goods" slither over the side, and for "half an awful wink that pinkness seemed ... to have folds like legs and corners like tiny clutching hands."

When Divine unfreezes and goes on with the game, he knows that "of course he had been dreaming." And besides, what could anyone do? Yet he dabs at his dinner that evening, stumbles away to his cabin in a funk.

Hours later, a ship's officer knocks. "We're missing a child, sir. A little girl." Mumbles Divine: "I saw something, but not a child, naturally. It was a scarf." The lie starts pounding in his skull, but when he finally blurts out the truth to the grieving mother, she treats it as a ruse to stop her harried search. By the time Author Steele has applied the last turn of the screw to Divine's conscience, the poor fellow is babbling insanely from a hospital cot.

The Black Road is a reminder th.it prodigal sons rarely change their spots. It takes Pa Ederly a minute to recognize the jazzy-looking lad who has walked into his general store. Then his eyes blink back the tears. "Well, I--I see you've grown some. But then, you do grow some between 15 and 23." Before the day is out, Prodigal Son Davie is acting like a new broom, ordering the store front painted bright red, plate glass for the big window, the latest finery for his mother.

But when Davie starts raving about the roadside diner he can buy for $300, and spouting the combination and cash contents of the rickety old safe, Pa Eder-ly's eyes blink without tears. Pretending a fear of robbers, Pa and the family stoke the safe with $300. "Given money, wheedled money, is always back to wheedle again," Pa muses. "With taken money it's a different story; it goes and stays." That night, as the rest huddle sadly near an upstairs window, Davie skedaddles with the loot, goes "to make his million, down the black road."

Sooth is a tale of the occult, its hero a colored roustabout seaman fleeing the violent end predicted for him by a "conjuh-woman." He switches from ship to ship and alias to alias. But always he hears the words of the soothsayer: "Wha'-foh you big teef shinin' to the sky? How come all this heah bullet-blood runnin' outen yoh skull-pate all oveh the groun'?"

One evening when his rumrunner is at anchor off a North Atlantic beach, he sees two seals romping in the moonlit waters. He slips over the side, soon feels more kinship with their sleek, black, shiny forms than he has ever felt with humans. Nearing shore, man and seals edge up on some rocks to rest. On shore, a bored young miss with a high-powered rifle is waiting to pot the seals and collect a new thrill. Two shots crack, but the Negro hears only the first, because "his head had caved in ... And so it was true and doubly true that what the soothsayer had said was sooth."

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