The Demon Lover

In 1916, the soldier to whom Kathleen (later Drover) is engaged is serving in France, where some of the most brutal fighting of World War I occurred. Readers know little about him except through the filter of Mrs. Drover’s perspective as she looks back on the last time she saw him: saying goodbye to him 25 years earlier, after a week’s military leave.

The young Kathleen has ambivalent feelings about him. She “wish[es] him already gone” (663), and she is eager to be back in “the safe arms of her mother and sister” (661). The reason for this is twofold. First, he is cruel. As she recalls it, he repeatedly presses her palm to one of his uniform buttons, cutting it. She also mentions that he talks to her “without feeling” and “was never kind” (665). She is “intimidated” and even feels a “complete suspension of her existence” in his presence (665). Later, she recalls that “he was set on [her]—that was what it was—not love” (665), implying that his feelings for her were proprietary and perhaps obsessive.

Kathleen’s anxiety about the soldier also reflects the fact that he is not fully definable. In the garden farewell, he is cast in shadow, underscoring Kathleen’s inability to see him clearly, either literally or symbolically. She clarifies that “it felt, from not seeing him at this intense moment, as though she had never seen him at all” (663). Kathleen does not seem to fully know the man she has agreed to marry. Years later, Mrs. Drover still struggles to remember what her fiancé was like, including his physical features. Although the trauma of his death may be causing her to repress memories of her fiancé’s face, the ambiguity serves another function. As the demon lover, the soldier shifts form, going from acceptable fiancé to a man who Kathleen “imagined [has] spectral glitters in the place of his eyes” (663). Even his death is ambiguous—he is “missing, presumed killed” (664). No body is found.

While it is unclear if this man is alive and/or the writer of the letter, Mrs. Drover believes he is. Her belief that he has come back from the dead hinges on the fact that his threatening and cruel nature makes it easy for Mrs. Drover to imagine him as a demon come to take her to hell.

Mrs. Drover’s present-day family includes her husband (William Drover) and their three sons. Mr. Drover married her in 1929, when she was 32 (and just as she and her family were becoming nervous about her prospects for marriage). She and William “settled down in this arboreal part of Kensington: in this house the years piled up, her children were born and they all lived till they were driven out by the bombs of the next war” (664). William gives Mrs. Drover pearls “on their marriage” (662), a traditional gift that suggests the orderliness and respectability of their life together. Nevertheless, there are indications her family life isn’t entirely happy. The birth of her third son was “attended by a quite serious illness” (663), and since then she has “had an intermittent muscular flicker to the left of her mouth” (663). The illness suggests fragility or possibly a discomfort with motherhood. Mrs. Drover might also have some underlying tension with William, which the dangers of the war heighten. She notes “her married London home [has a] whole air of being a cracked cup from which memory, with its reassuring power, had either evaporated or leaked away” (664). Even so, Mrs. Drover seems to want to hold onto her family life. Throughout the story, the character is identified as “Mrs. Drover” unless she is talking about her youth, which shows how much stock she puts in her role as wife and mother.

Kathleen’s mother and sister are relatively flat characters. However, they provide key information in the story. Kathleen sees them as a source of comfort during her garden encounter with the soldier and hopes to run into their “safe arms” (662). Her sister currently lives with Kathleen in the country and made her a “pink wool jumper […] last autumn as they sat round the fire” (662). These passages associate the sister and mother with nurturing and protective domesticity. Moreover, their perception of the soldier is clear to Kathleen. Her mother noted that the soldier “never considered” Kathleen, and the family observed that during the visit with him, Kathleen was “not herself” (665). These comments show that Kathleen felt unsafe with the soldier and that he was a questionable figure, allowing the reader to feel that Mrs. Drover might be in actual danger.

The caretaker is a minor character whom Mrs. Drover is annoyed with, feeling he has neglected his duties. This “part-­time caretaker she shared with some neighbors” is on holiday during the story (661). However, he does not ever “look in often” (661), which explains the home’s dusty interior. Mrs. Drover is unsure if she “trust[s] him” (661), and this feeling grows when she realizes he hasn’t forwarded the unexpected letter she finds on the hall table. Later, after she reads the letter, she thinks about how the letter wound up waiting on the hall table: “Letters dropped in at doors of deserted houses do not fly or walk to tables in halls […] There is needed some human hand—but nobody but the caretaker had a key” (664-65). Some critics have speculated that the caretaker is the demon lover of the title and/or her former fiancé, who has decided to stalk Mrs. Drover.