Hugh B. Cave: "Betrayal," "The Hunter and the Hunted," and "Little Girl in Black Stockings"

I think of Hugh B. Cave as a guy who writes about people being mutilated, but his career has multiple facets, and he had quite a few stories published in mainstream magazine The Saturday Evening Post.  We just read one of them, "The Mission," which was billed as "A Little Classic of the Spirit" when it was reprinted in book form.  "The Mission" included no mutilations.  Several of Cave's Saturday Evening Post stories were among those collected in the 1963 collection The Witching Lands, which reprints 14 stories about the West Indies.  Let's check out three of them, "Betrayal," "The Hunter and the Hunted," and "Little Girl in Black Stockings."  Is there any chance somebody will be mutilated in any of these stories?  Cross your fingers, sickos!   

I am reading these stories in a scan of a British edition of The Witching Lands I downloaded while spelunking around the interwebs.  You can try to access a scan of that same edition here, and an American edition here, both at the internet archive. 

"Betrayal" (1952)

The texts on the jackets of both editions of The Witching Lands to which I have access give you the idea that the stories in the book are all narrated by a guy who owns a hotel on St. Joseph, which I guess is a fictional Caribbean island that represents multiple Caribbean islands the way Springfield of The Simpsons or Metropolis of Superman represent archetypal American towns.  Here in "Betrayal" the narrator is pretty superfluous--almost the entire story reads like a standard third-person omniscient kind of thing.   

James Lanning is an American who has lived in the West Indies for three years.  Betrayed by his business partner six months ago, left with only a boat, he has money troubles and so has gotten involved with a dangerous character who wants to be transported to St. Joseph as part of some scheme to affect the upcoming election.  This troublemaker will pay Lanning a thousand bucks, a lot of money in 1952--hell, even today it could pay for a two or three years' supply of Ovaltine!  While waiting to meet this guy in a bar in Santiago, Lanning runs into Patricia Marcy, an American singer who has left an unsuccessful band because the band leader was getting fresh.  Patricia has no money, so wants a job to finance her return to New York.  Lanning tells her he'll let her stay in his place while he's on his secret mission transporting a terrorist or revolutionary or whatever he is and lend her money when he gets back. 

When Lanning gets to his boat that night his passenger is waiting for him.  He asks for the first installment of the thousand, and the guy says his crony delivered it to Lanning's house--a woman took it.  Lanning figures Patricia Marcy must have stolen the cash and left town.  He goes through with the mission--after all, he'll get the other $500 when it is over.

During Lanning's adventure helping the political exile sneak home, conning a boat to a secluded, little-visited cove, riding horses on rough terrain, etc., the exile spouts wisdom about the need to trust people and look on the bright side and so forth, trying to cure Lanning of his cynicism.  This activist is betrayed by a colleague and a fight erupts--Lansing fights at the side of his client.  Then they head back to Santiago.  The exile's experience of betrayal at the hands of a friend has not shaken his faith and confidence, in contrast to Lanning, who doesn't trust Patricia because his business partner betrayed him.  Lanning finds that Patricia has not taken the money and run back to New York, but instead gotten a job as a typist and done Lanning's laundry and other neglected housework.  They decide to get married in St. Joseph, where Lanning tells the narrator his story.

This story is OK, maybe worthy of a mild recommendation.  Like "The Mission," it is about how a good person's influence makes other people better, but it is a little more exciting because this exemplar is on a secret mission and shoots people.  

"The Hunter and the Hunted" (1956)

Behind a cover engineered to appeal to all you foot fetishists out there, "The Hunter and the Hunted" debuted alongside stories by important mainstream writer William Saroyan as well as Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Wylie, men with one foot in the SF camp and one in the mainstream.  "The Hunter and the Hunted" was reprinted in the British magazine John Bull.

The narrator is even more superfluous here than in "Betrayal."  I wonder if the narrator gag was introduced in the book to link the stories together.

Marcel is a cop in St. Joseph City.  He left his home village in the mountains six years ago, and has had no contact with family or friends back home--nobody back home even knows he is a police officer.  The Captain sends him to his place of origin to capture Le Vagabond, who is said to be hiding there.  After a drive of two and a half days, Marcel arrives at home and finds Le Vagabond  with ease.  Marcel's quarry, a thorn in the side of the President and his cronies, but whose actual political activities Cave leaves totally undescribed, has adopted a little girl, the daughter of Marcel's old girlfriend and the boyfriend she took up with after Marcel left, an unpopular jerk from some other village, now gone.

Just like Yolanda in "The Mission" and the political activist in "Betrayal," Le Vagabond is a generous person whose goodness rubs off on all those around him.  A woman who was sick and ugly when Marcel left is keeping house with Le Vagabond and now she is hale and healthy.  The house Le Vagabond lives in is now in terrific shape, but was a terrible ruin last time Marcel saw it six years ago.  The little girl obviously loves him--he is a good father.  It will be hard for Marcel to arrest him and drag him back to the capital.

A ferocious storm hits, giving Le Vagabond another opportunity to show how awesome a guy he is.  The refurbished house is wrecked.  The four people take shelter in a cave.  A landslide seals the cave entrance.  So Le Vagabond jumps into an underground river he knows leads to the surface to get help.  This is a suicide mission--if the underground stream turns too sharply or gets too narrow, Le Vagabond will surely drown in the dark.

Marcel, the woman, and the little girl are dug out by villagers who claim they never saw Le Vagabond.  It is clear Le Vagabond alerted them to the plight of Marcel and company and everybody is in on a scheme to save Le Vagabond from the feds.  Marcel resigns from the police force and stays in the village and becomes father to the little girl and marries a cousin of his old girlfriend.  Sometime later Le Vagabond reappears just to visit--he is currently at some other mountain village, improving it.

"The Hunter and the Hunted" is OK, but the fact that it has the same theme as the last two Cave stories we read is kind of annoying.  "Little Girl in Black Stockings" better do something different.   

"Little Girl in Black Stockings" (1960)

Doctor Jourdan is a woman with greying hair who runs Ecole Pour Les Enfants Handicapes in St. Joseph City.  Today it rains heavily as she rides with Melodie, a nine-year-old girl, back to Melodie's mountain village, the girl's period of recovery at the school being concluded.  Melodie wears black stockings in a country where women all go bare-legged, and it is implied one of her legs was amputated after an accident back home three years ago and she has an artificial leg.  On the ride, through their conversation, we learn more about Melodie and her village.

The car gets stuck in a stream that crosses the road right next to the village so they walk into town.  There is a touching scene in which the driver expresses his love for Melodie.  These Cave Saturday Evening Post stories are for softies--all three of today's stories have scenes in which a parental figure expresses love for a child or vice versa.

The village is largely deserted as the villagers are at their gardens and farms, trying to keep the flood from washing away their soil.  Nobody being at the house of the aunt who is raising Melodie because Mom abandoned Melodie after Dad died in a fall from a mule, the doctor and Melodie head to the school, crossing the narrow bridge across the river from which Melodie fell in the accident that caused her disability.  The loving aunt is playing substitute teacher today.  The aunt tells Doctor Jourdan that the father of the boy who died in the accident which maimed Melodie, the local magistrate, blames Melodie for his son's death, and has been talking about driving the little girl out of the village.  The impressionable school kids have got the message that Melodie is to be shunned. 

Doctor Jourdan has the aunt take her to see the magistrate, a fat guy with the biggest house in town, to try to reason with him, but he is unreasonable, driven by guilt because he was supposed to keep an eye on his four-year-old boy that day and he let the tyke out of his sight so that he followed Melodie to the bridge to look for crayfish and, like her, was swept away by a tree branch that was floating downstream.

It has been raining the whole time and now the dangerous bridge over the river is below water and the kids, Melodie among them, are stranded at the school without adult supervision.  The magistrate's daughter is one of the oldest kids and a kind of leader and wants them all to try to run across the submerged bridge, but Melodie distracts the kids from this risky plan by showing them her artificial leg and telling stories of the city, which of course they have never been to, and teaching them songs taught her by Doctor Jourdan.  Melodie is a hero beloved by all the kids by the time the river has lowered and the adults can get to the school and the magistrate's heart softens.

This story is more affecting than "Betrayal" and "The Hunter and the Hunted" because thinking about a little girl amputee is sort of disturbing and depressing--I can shrug off an adult man having some problem because he has taken a risk but I certainly can't avoid feeling anxious about some innocent little girl losing her limb and then being shunned by her peers.  But, as I feared, "Little Girl in Black Stockings"' central theme is much like that of our earlier Cave Saturday Evening Post contributions--Melodie, in becoming a leader to the kids, is emulating Doctor Jourdan, even taking on the good doctor's mannerisms and methods of speaking; the doctor is a role model for goodness who has elevated those around her.

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Science fiction and weird stories tend to be challenging and surprising, always trying to convince you of some perhaps counterintuitive thing or going out on a limb to predict the future or extrapolate how some new element in society might change our lives.  Or, they are just adventure stories or horror storis set in a strange milieu that appeal to our fascination with sex and violence.  Either way, you kind of grapple with a SF story, have to try to figure it out, if only figure out if it has merit or is just nonsense or exploitative trash.  At least I do.  Literary fiction is also challenging or surprising, literary authors often springing wacky ideas or difficult techniques on you, so that, again, you've got to come to terms with them--Moby Dick or The Magic Mountain or In Search of Lost Time take you on a challenging journey, while more recent literary authors like Celine or Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski get in your face, challenging you to figure out how you feel about the outrageous behavior and opinions of their autobiographical characters.   

Mainstream popular entertainment stories like today's stories by Hugh B. Cave, on the other hand, are kind of like most TV shows--predictable, anodyne, meant to comfort you, many approaching the status of white noise or static.  Such fiction puts the reader in the position of passive observer of the mundane rather than of participant in a relationship with the author and interpreter of something strange.  Of course I am painting with a broad brush and there is a lot of overlap between literary and mainstream popular fiction--I love P. G. Wodehouse and W. Somerset Maugham, and think of them as literary or quasi-literary, and their work appeared in mainstream popular outlets.  But reading four stories from the Saturday Evening Post in a row, shortly after reading a fifth by Shirley Jackson, has validated in my own mind my decision to focus my reading in the SF realm instead of the mainstream.  Cave's stories today are competent, more competent than many of his weird stories, but they lack personality and excitement, they feel safe, reading them is like watching a man walk down the street, whereas reading a weird or science fiction story is like watching a man walk along a tightrope--is this daredevil going to make it?

So, I can mildly recommend two of today's stories, and the other is unobjectionable, but I won't be reading any more stories from The Witching Lands.