There it was, what he wanted—tangibly before him, like the fairy world of a Christmas pantomime—but mocking spirits stood guard at the doors, and, as the rain beat in his face, Paul wondered whether he were destined always to shiver in the black night outside, looking up at it.
Here is the moment of truth for the troubled young man in this story. The symbol of Paul’s fairy tale world—the concert hall and all the mysteries and magic contained within in—is empty, unlit and subject to the cold rain and slicing wind of reality as him. Mocked by the reality of the conflict between what he purports to stand for, what he wants and what he cannot stand the idea of settling for, this moment of collapse of his fairy tale is turning point that seals his self-proscribed doom.
For the Were-Wolf Dog hated Christmas too, incomprehensible as that may seem.
Six decades before Dr. Seuss introduced a latter-day version of Scrooge to the world in the form of his Grinch who hated the whole Christmas season, Willa Cather unleashed upon an unsuspecting world one of the first Christmas villains in the form of a were-wolf dog targeting Santa’s reindeers as his key to stealing Christmas.
"That particular picture I got from a story a Mexican priest told me; he said he found it in an old manuscript book in a monastery down there, written by some Spanish Missionary, who got his stories from the Aztecs. This one he called 'The Forty Lovers of the Queen,' and it was more or less about rain-making."
This quote exemplifies the way that Cather occasionally turns to mythic imagery and metaphor to add a layer of meaning to her stories. The love story between the painter who is here commencing what will be a rather long story-within-the-story and his model is the centerpiece of a narrative that permeates with allusions to myth, legend and symbolic archetypes. The result is an extension of thematic meaning to the story that would otherwise feel thinner than it should.
Among the northern people who emigrate to the great west, only the children and the old people ever long much for the lands they have left over the water. The men only know that in this new land their plow runs across the field tearing up the fresh, warm earth, with never a stone to stay its course. That if they dig and delve the land long enough, and if they are not compelled to mortgage it to keep body and soul together, some day it will be theirs, their very own. They are not like the southern people; they lose their love for their fatherland quicker and have less of sentiment about them.
Key to appreciating much of the short fiction of Willa Cather is understanding the primal role played by the migrant experience. Specifically, the Scandinavian culture, especially Norwegian, Swedish and—in the specific case of the title character of this story—Danish culture. First and second generation immigrants from this part of the world dominate the landscape upon which Cather paints her prose, especially when the focus is not so much on artists and more on small town and rural locations. To get at a point of full understanding of the drives and limitations of these character requires at least a cursory appreciation for the cultural distinctions brought to her Nebraska plains by those stimulated to leave their homeland behind.
