Walter de la Mare suggests several possible futures for Arthur Lawford, the main character in his horror story The Return. The ghost of the wicked Frenchman who is possessing him could slip away and he could be his old self again, free from the malign influence; his wife's circle of friends could declare him hopelessly insane and have him put away; he might leave his family entirely and go off somewhere else; he might even die, perhaps by his own hand.
The final outcome is unclear; the story ends suddenly without Arthur Lawford's fate being spelled out. However, there is still some miscellaneous material to comment on.
Arthur Lawford attacks a fat man
There isn't much humour in The Return, but I was amused by one passage. When Mrs Lawford calls in a very fat friend of hers called Mr Danton, the French ghost attacks him through Arthur and makes some contemptuous and offensive remarks:
“Danton at heart was always an incorrigible sceptic. Aren’t you, T. D.? You pride your dear old brawn on it in secret?...Firm, unctuous, subtle, scepticism; and to that end your body flourishes. You were born fat; you became fat; and fat, my dear Danton, has been deliberately thrust on you—in layers! Lampreys! You’ll perish of surfeit some day, of sheer Dantonism. And fat, postmortem, Danton. Oh, what a basting’s there!”
The ghost of the Frenchman sometimes recedes leaving Arthur almost his old self, but the mischievous, saturnine, vindictive Nicholas Sabathier is definitely in the ascendant here.
Other interpretations of the strange symptoms
It is possible that Arthur Lawford's bizarre behaviour was originally caused by a subconscious attempt to break out of his unsatisfactory life, the old 'deadly round'; 'Nicholas Sabathier the dark Adventurer' could be Arthur's shadow self, displaying all his repressed qualities and saying things that Arthur would not normally permit himself to say.
His friend Herbert Herbert plays the devil's advocate at one point, suggesting that the French ghost and the symptoms of possession are a result of Arthur's imagination having been triggered by the inscription on the tombstone and that Arthur has hypnotised both himself and other people into seeing changes in his appearance and personality.
So is The Return a psychological or a supernatural horror story? For whatever reason, Walter de la Mare didn't commit himself.
In my opinion, the vagueness and obscurity of the plot and the unsatisfactory ending devalue the story.
Trinities and the Power of Three again
Just as I put Anthony Hope below Rafael Sabatini and Sabatini below John Buchan, I put The Return below May Sinclair's Flaw in the Crystal and the Crystal below Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Parasite.
Rafael Sabatini and Nicholas Sabathier, the dead Frenchman in The Return, have names with a common origin; they are derived from a word for shoemaker. By coincidence, Conan Doyle visited a medium whose husband was called Hugo Sabatier.
After seeing all the occurrences of the number three in the top two stories, I looked for this number in The Return. I am not sure how significant the many references I found are, but a few seem worth highlighting.
Arthur Lawford asks his wife Sheila to bring him a letter from his old writing desk, It is in the third little drawer from the top, it is dated April 3rd and part of it is underlined three times.
Lawford at one point has just three books in his room.
Herbert Herbert asks Lawford to visit him; his house is the third one after the Rectory. It has three lower casements.
The characters in The Return form groups of three in a variety of permutations; there are mentions of three witnesses, all three alone together, all three of us, three friends...
Incidentally, among the titles of Walter de la Mare's other works are The Three Royal Monkeys, The Three Sleeping Boys of Warwickshire, I Saw Three Witches, The Three Beggars, Three Cherry Trees, Three Jolly Gentlemen and Three Jolly Farmers.
Something about Walter de la Mare
When Walter de la Mare's character Herbert Herbert mentions operating as an individual and living his own life, he is speaking on behalf of the author. This picture of de la Mare includes a quotation from one of his poems:
May Sinclair and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were both members of the Society for Psychical Research. Walter de la Mare was familiar with this organisation, and he mentions it in The Return. Another friend of the familysays this:
“And I’m bound to confess that the Society for Psychical Research, which has among its members quite eminent and entirely trustworthy men of science—I am bound to admit they have some very curious stories to tell.“
Walter de la Mare is yet another writer who was interested in and influenced by the Brontës. Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester are characters in one of his stories and there are references to Wuthering Heights in another one.
He wrote many more supernatural stories, which as usual are available both as books to buy and for reading online at no cost on Project Gutenberg.
Walter de la Mare died on June 22nd 1956, which makes today an appropriate occasion to publish this third and final article in the series about The Return.
