The Return

By: Walter de la Mare

Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki

“What a haunting inescapable riddle life was.”

A classic ghost story, Walter de la Mare’s The Return follows the exceedingly ordinary Arthur Lawford and his possession by none other than an eighteenth-century pirate!

While wandering the local graveyard on behalf of his wife, whom he can sense wishes him out of the house for a bit, Lawford comes across the grave of Nicholas Sabathier and experiences a nasty shock that feels something like a heart attack. But when he wakes back up in the graveyard the next morning, he returns home, goes to his bedroom, and turns to the mirror only to see that a dead Frenchman is staring back at him from the looking glass. And that dead Frenchman is exactly who Sheila Lawford sees when she looks at her husband. Lawford must convince his wife, the vicar, the doctor, and anyone else he comes across that he is in fact ordinary Arthur before they can even begin to work to rid him of this ghost.

The Return is a haunting portrayal of domestic drama, ghostly possession, and unrequited love that fits firmly among de la Mare’s finest Gothic tales.

Originally published in 1910.

Public Domain (P)2023 Blackstone Publishing

“Standing face to face with the unknown”

What a weird story is Walter de la Mare’s The Return (1910)!

Stolid English gentleman Arthur Lawford is convalescing from a recent illness when, full of melancholy and ennui he wanders into small, old Witherstone churchyard to read the gravestones there. One stone set apart from the others in the unmarked grave area grabs his attention because it's from the 18th century and belongs to a Huguenot “stranger” called Nicholas Sabathier who took his own life. When he bends down to examine the gravestone and tries to put his fingers into the large crack running down the middle, he's filled with dismay and weariness, feels “the target of cold and hostile scrutiny,” and perhaps loses consciousness. But then he finds himself elatedly trotting home feeling quite healthy after having been so sick. Back in his bedroom, he feels alert like a night creature fearing danger and then looks in the mirror and sees a stranger’s face looking back at him!

The novel then minutely details Arthur’s desperate attempts to find out what’s happened to him and to come to terms with it and to convince his wife that he’s himself while trying to avoid being seen by their maid or friends, who, of course, would believe he’s a stranger, etc. Or is he simply suffering from illness and nerves and imagining the change in his face? What should he do? Reading through a big medical book sure doesn’t solve his dilemma. He contemplates suicide.

Luckily, he has allies in his horrible predicament, like the family friend old vicar Bethany, who takes it on faith (with the support of some answers to questions that only he and Arthur would know) that it’s Arthur behind the stranger’s mask, and an odd brother and sister who live away from society next to the churchyard and some constantly flowing water and suggest supernatural explanations (after all, as the brother tells Arthur, “It's only the impossible that's credible whatever credible means”). What resonates with Arthur is being told that he’s suffering from a complete transmogrification due to some intrusion or enchantment, that anything outlandish and bizarre is a godsend in this rather stodgy life, and that after all the “ghost” who tried to possess him mostly failed and could only replace his face.

In the usual ghost story of possession, a spirit inhabits a victim’s body, but de la Mare imagines the body of a spirit inhabiting a victim’s soul, so to speak. That is, Arthur, despite some possible assaults on his personality and insertions of foreign memories, remains essentially himself, though indeed given his traumatic experience, he does not remain his pre-possession boring, conventional, unimaginative self, who led a “meaningless,” half-dead life. His love for his trusty and trusting fifteen-year-old daughter Alice deepens, but his view of his practical wife Sheila, too concerned with what their community will think and half believing that some sin of Arthur has called this calamity down on him, does not improve.

Although it gets a little talky now and then, the novel has lots of great writing—

*numinous descriptions, like
“…out of the garden beyond came the voice of some evening bird singing with such an unspeakable ecstasy of grief it seemed it must be perched upon the confines of some other world.”

*vivid similes, like
“His companion’s face was still smiling around the remembrance of his laughter like ripples after the splash of a stone.”

*neat lines on human nature and life, like
“Are we the prisoners, the slaves, the inheritors, the creatures or the creators of our bodies? Fallen angels or horrific dust?”

But what will practical people like Sheila’s cynical, practical, toadlike friend Danton (who says things like, “Servants must have the same wonderful instinct as dogs and children”) do? Will he really try to have Arthur committed to an asylum so he can’t do any mischief to anyone? Or if he’s looking back more like his original self, will they let the matter drop? Will Sheila and Arthur salvage their relationship? Will he visit the unconventional, cool brother and sister team again? Has he really ejected Sabathier in spirit AND body or only in spirit? Was he ever really possessed by the Frenchman’s face? What DOES it all mean?

The novel strongly conveys how contingent are our relationships with other people and our own identities, how deeply based they are upon our faces as people (including ourselves) get used to them over time, and how the scientific/realistic view is unable to deal with certain experiences in life, and how convention and protocol and face etc. are stodgy and stultifying, and how common kindness and love and care and concern may ground us. And how mysterious life is and how magical the world:

“It was this mystery, bereft now of all fear, and this beauty together, that made life the endless, changing and yet changeless, thing it was. And yet mystery and loveliness were only really appreciable with one’s legs, as it were, dangling down over into the grave.”

American audiobook reader Stefan Rudnicki is his usual professional, deep and rich voiced self here, though he kind of assumes a slight British accent for this British novel about a British gentleman.

My favorite book by de la Mare is his sublime (and superficially very different) children’s book The Three Mulla Mulgars (1919), but The Return is strange and absorbing. Readers who like Henry James and Algernon Blackwood should read it.