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.
Arthur Lawford feels strangely exalted when he wakes up. He hurries home and goes upstairs to his room. He lights some candles and looks at himself in the dressing-table mirror.
He sees a stranger in the glass: he has been possessed by the dead Frenchman!
Imposter!
Arthur Lawford tries to persuade his wife Sheila that the stranger in the house is really him. He tells her that he had a 'nervous fit' or heart attack in the churchyard. At first she refuses to believe him:
“His wife stood irresolute. ‘I understand you to explain,’ she said, ‘that you went out of this house, just your usual self, this afternoon, for a walk; that for some reason you went to Widderstone—“to read the tombstones,” that you had a heart attack, or, as you said at first, a fit, that you fell into a stupor, and came home like—like this. Am I likely to believe all that? Am I likely to believe such a story as that? Whoever you are, whoever you may be, is it likely? I am not in the least afraid. I thought at first it was some silly practical joke. I thought that at first.’”
Sheila Lawford rises to the occasion very well. She tries to prove that this unrecognisable man who says he is her husband is not the real Arthur by tricking him. For example, she mentions fetching his brother to help – he has been dead for close to three years and Arthur tells her this. She mentions an 'old friend' whose name Arthur doesn't recognise and he tells her so.
It is lucky for Arthur that is mainly his appearance and voice that have changed; he has retained his memories.
The vicar takes a hand
Sheila Lawford fetches Mr Bethany the vicar, who is an old friend of the family. He gets straight down to business:
“‘I have found, Lawford,’ he said smoothly, ‘that in all real difficulties the only feasible plan is—is to face the main issue...may I hear then exactly the whole story? All that I know now, so far as I could gather from your wife, poor soul, is of course inconceivable: that you went out one man and came home another.'”
It may seem impossible to believe, but this is exactly what happened!
Mr Bethany listens to Arthur Lawford's account of his experience then asks some key questions. After establishing that Arthur had not taken any medication and was alone in the churchyard, he moves to more metaphysical possibilities:
“‘What had you been thinking of? In these days of faith-cures, and hypnotism, and telepathy, and subliminalities—why, the simple old world grows very confusing. But rarely, very rarely novel. You were thinking, you say; do you remember, perhaps, just the drift?’
This is exactly the right question to ask. It is very similar to what Lucy Carlyle asks Lockwood in Jonathan Stroud's Empty Grave after they have been attacked by a ghost, or Visitor. It was this connection that made me decide to produce an article.
The vicar again does the right thing when he asks some more questions, test ones that only the real Arthur could answer. He is now convinced that Arthur's story is true, and soon Mrs Lawford is too.
Now they have to decide how to explain the absence of Arthur Lawford and the presence of a stranger to everyone else in their lives.
They also have to find the cause of and a solution to Arthur's little problem. Until this is done, Arthur has to endure the sensation of a hostile alien presence, both inside himself and on the outside:
“...he became suddenly conscious that something, somebody had passed across the doorway, and in passing had looked in on him...So sudden and transitory had been the experience that it seemed now to be illusory; yet it had so caught him up, it had with so furtive and sinister a quietness broken in on his solitude, that for a moment he dared not move. A cold, indefinite sensation stole over him that he was being watched; that some dim, evil presence was behind him biding its time, patient and stealthy, with eyes fixed unmovingly on him where he stood.”
Churchyards can be very beautiful and peaceful places; they can also be dark and dangerous:
