I like WaIter de la Mare's children's stories and poems very much indeed. I feel much the same about them as I do about the works of Eleanor Farjeon and Nicholas Stuart Gray.
As is the case with many other poets and writers I like, nothing relevant about WaIter de la Mare came to mind when I was mining the past for people, books and other material of interest. However, I recently learned that he wrote a supernatural novel called The Return, a horror story about possession of the living by the dead that was first published in 1910. I am not a great reader of ghost and horror stories, but this one seemed worth investigating.
I found a copy and soon saw that while The Return is not a particularly good read, it does contain a small amount of material of interest. There are some elements in it that remind me of May Sinclair's Flaw in the Crystal, and there are a few points and connections that inspire commentary. The Return rambles a bit and the story fades away; the quotable material comes mostly from the early chapters.
The main character is called Arthur Lawford, who is a rather dull and conventional man. He is the object of psychic possession with its associated horrors.
How the horror starts
Arthur Lawford has been suffering from ongoing ill-health. He has taken to solitary ramblings because he senses that his wife Sheila has been finding his presence irksome and would welcome his absence from the house.
He wanders around in a churchyard and reads some of the inscriptions on the headstones. An unusual grave attracts his attention; the inscription is almost illegible but he tries to decode it. The grave appears to contain the remains of a French stranger called Nicholas Sabathier who died by his own hand in 1739. He kneels down to get a closer look; his heart starts to beat in an unusual way; he feels ill and weak. He decides to go home but falls asleep instead.
