Critics agree that Paul commits suicide by throwing himself before a train at the end of Willa Cather's “Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament.” But is this the only reading possible; in fact, is this reading even likely given the story's details? Bessie du Bois, one of Cather's earliest reviewers, quotes the final paragraphs of “Paul's Case” and then says something that would strike most readers as quite odd: “One feels rather defrauded that the author has omitted to say what came next; it would have been so easy to go on” (du Bois 613).¹ With Paul's broken body hurtling through the air, one wonders what the reviewer might wish Cather to add to the tale. After all, Paul is dead—or is he?

Let us review the day on which we meet Paul. The story opens in late November with Paul, a Pittsburgh High School student under suspension for various ill-defined infractions, about to appear before the faculty's “inquisition” (103). His teachers all take their turns attacking Paul, but he remains composed and unaffected. When the faculty finishes with him, it is so late in the afternoon that he decides to forgo supper at home to go directly to Carnegie Hall, where he has a job as an usher. The concert hall has not opened, so Paul relaxes in the picture gallery. There he is “always exhilarated” by the paintings, and on this particular evening he “sat down before a blue Rico and lost himself” (104) until sometime after seven o'clock. Paul then hurries to don his usher's uniform, feeling, as he invariably does, “always considerably excited” (105) as he dresses for his duties in the concert hall. With great animation he seats the concert-goers, and finally settles into a chair, where “with a long sigh of relief, … [he] lost himself” (105) in a reverie brought on by the music. Cather explicitly likens this new fantasy to Paul's hours before the painting and describes it more fully than the first:

It was not that symphonies, as such, meant anything in particular to Paul, but the first sigh of the instruments seemed to free some hilarious and potent spirit within him; something that struggled there like the Genius in the bottle found by the Arab fisherman. He felt a sudden zest of life; the lights danced before his eyes and the concert hall blazed into unimaginable splendour.

(105)

Paul often daydreams in this way, even in school, where we have all seen the student who “always looked out of the window during the recitation” (103), his mind on something other than what the teacher is discussing. But Cather does not leave us wondering about the specific subjects of Paul's dreams. She takes us into one of them immediately after the concert. He leaves the concert hall early, where with “the feeling of not being able to let down, of its being impossible to give up this delicious excitement which was the only thing that could be called living at all,” he paces “rapidly up and down the walk” (106). Paul is waiting: he follows the cab of the soprano who performed that night at Carnegie Hall to the Schenley Hotel. As Paul longs “to enter and leave school-masters and dull care behind him for ever” (106), he imagines himself suddenly swept into the building:

In the moment that the door was ajar, it seemed to Paul that he, too, entered. He seemed to feel himself go after her up the steps, into the warm, lighted building, into an exotic, a tropical world of shiny, glistening surfaces and basking ease. He reflected upon the mysterious dishes that were brought into the dining-room, the green bottles in buckets of ice, as he had seen them in the supper party pictures of the Sunday World supplement. A quick gust of wind brought the rain down with sudden vehemence, and Paul was startled to find that he was still outside in the slush of the gravel driveway; that his boots were letting in the water and his scanty overcoat was clinging wet about him; that the lights in front of the concert hall were out, and that the rain was driving in sheets between him and the orange glow of the windows above him. 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.

(106-07)

This extended reverie, like the others, shows Paul's ability to inject himself into a story of his own making. During these fantasies, he loses track of time, place, and self. They occur in every case after periods of physical and mental excitement, in moments when Paul is relaxing and allowing his mind to wander. For reality he substitutes images drawn from the newspapers and the stage, from fairy tale and romance. Not that he gets his inspiration from these sources; indeed, he rarely reads (111). In fact, painting and music—good or bad (“from an orchestra to a barrel organ” [111])—inspire Paul's dreams at best indirectly. All he gets from them is “the spark, the indescribable thrill that made his imagination master of his senses, and he could make plots and pictures enough of his own” (111). The periods of excitement and subsequent relaxation help him attain the state of consciousness he requires to create stories, to get past those “mocking spirits,” if only temporarily. The narrator's description of Paul's pupils as “abnormally large, as though he were addicted to belladonna, but there was a glassy glitter about them which that drug does not produce” (102), suggests that Paul is in fact addicted to something, and that something seems to be this cycle of excitement, relaxation, and reverie, into which Paul falls time and again.

Yet the long day must now end for Paul. He dreads returning to his (almost literally) colorless² life on Cordelia Street, and most of all dreads meeting his father, explaining why he is so late, and, no doubt, although there is no mention of it, giving an account of what happened at “the inquisition” that day. So Paul decides to sneak into the basement to hide until morning. Soaked through, he huddles near the furnace and stares fearfully into the darkness for his father to appear at the top of the stairs. After an entire evening of exhilaration, he falls into a now familiar pattern: “when his senses were deadened, Paul's head was always singularly clear” (108), and, as before, he begins to imagine, to make plots and pictures. Three scenarios come to mind:

Suppose his father had heard him getting in at the window and had come down and shot him for a burglar? Then, again, suppose his father had come down, pistol in hand, and he had cried out in time to save himself, and his father had been horrified to think how nearly he had killed him? Then, again, suppose a day should come when his father would remember that night, and wish there had been no warning cry to stay his hand? With this last supposition Paul entertained himself until daybreak.

(108)

Is it possible that the rest of “Paul's Case” arises from these scenarios, especially the last? To put it another way, does Paul, sitting alone in the basement, imagine all that follows? When Paul drops “back into the immense design of things” (121) at the end, is that the reader's clue that Paul never actually left it, that he has been standing, so to speak, outside the Schenley all this time looking up, or, literally, that he has been in his basement all this time looking up the steps for the arrival of the feared father and yet picturing himself elsewhere? This is the argument I will follow here.

Curiously, we never see Paul's meeting with his father, but are instead transported abruptly in the next paragraph to a typical Sunday afternoon on Cordelia Street. The motif of Paul at the bottom of the basement steps and his father at the top recurs with Paul on the “lowest step of his ‘stop’” and his father “on the top step” (109)—both recalling Paul looking up at the Schenley and contrasting with his superior position later as he gazes down from the Waldorf. If Paul is imagining all this, one can easily see how his present situation (in the basement) provides materials that he is reworking in this (day)dream.³ Now one may argue that all this proves is that Cather consistently develops motifs throughout the story—that (day)dreaming does not enter into it—but that ignores two facts: (1) Paul's obvious preoccupation with his fantasy world, and (2) the abrupt shift between Paul's beginning to create stories about his father and the very next paragraph that starts to tell us a story about Paul and his father. Indeed, one has the feeling that the tale almost begins anew with the description of the day and weather: “The following Sunday was fine; the sodden November chill was broken by the last flash of autumnal summer” (108). Except for the first two words, this could well be a new story.

This new story—Paul's reverie—continues with the tale of his increasing disdain for school until the time, presumably no more than a few weeks after the story opens, when his father and the Principal decide that nothing more can be done with the boy. Paul is withdrawn from school and put to work. His father also makes him quit his position at Carnegie Hall and never again enter the theater.

A shift still more abrupt than the first—and marked by a blank line in the text⁴—signals a new movement. The reader slowly learns that Paul's reverie has shifted to January, that he has become a burglar (recalling the first scenario) by stealing money from his employer, and that he plans to live the high life in New York. The Waldorf replaces—or reconstitutes from the day residue—the Schenley, and again Paul imagines himself inside, enjoying all the opulence New York can offer. He finds himself delighting in each article of new clothing⁵ and basking in the luxury of a dream-world where “Everything was quite perfect; he was exactly the kind of boy he had always wanted to be” (115). As in a dream, Paul can even change reality to match the “plots and pictures” he wishes to see: “everything was as it should be; there was but one detail in his mental picture that the place did not realize, so he rang for the bell boy and sent him down for flowers” (114; my emphasis).

Yet there is the lingering sense that this is only a reverie. Everything seems a bit too perfect to be believed—and Paul, too, recognizes this. He thinks of the Waldorf as “an enchanted palace, built and peopled for him alone” (116). He asks himself, “had he not always been thus, had he not sat here night after night, from as far back as he could remember … ? He rather thought he had” (116). The images repeatedly stress the artificial and unnatural aspects of the hothouse life behind the Waldorf's glass windows—all the while an ominous snowstorm rages without. References to Central Park as a “stage winter-piece” (115), the “pageant” (117) that passes before Paul, wine as “a magician's wand for wonder-building” (117), and many others, reinforce this feeling that we are looking into Paul's fantasy, a world created out of those “supper party pictures of the Sunday World supplement,” a world that finally Paul only observes but cannot join, at least in part because it is not a real world at all but a (day)dream.

This reverie, “the plot of all dramas, the text of all romances … was whirling about him like the snow flakes. He burnt like a faggot in a tempest” (116). Such a flame cannot last long. Neither can this fantasy. Although Paul believes shortly after his arrival in New York that “this time there would be no awakening, no figure at the top of the stairs” (115), and just as Paul's “golden days went by without a shadow, and he made each as perfect as he could” (118), word comes by way of the Pittsburgh newspapers that his father has repaid the money his son had stolen and is en route to New York to retrieve the errant youth.

Paul now sees that Cordelia Street is inescapable. Just as Paul had known on the way home from Carnegie Hall that “The end had to come sometime; his father in his night-clothes at the top of the stairs …” (107), so, too, this fantasy is coming to a close. The burglar of the first scenario has already appeared on Paul's stage, the father who figures in each of the proposed plots is about to appear, and only the pistol remains to be played. It appears suddenly: we learn, in the sort of narrative afterthought that makes sense only in a (day)dream, that Paul bought a revolver on his first day in New York. Paul (in the basement) introduces the gun in much the same way he brought the flowers onto the stage: he wills it to be there. But Paul will not shoot himself—that would be too much like the role he has assigned his father in each of the scenarios—and so he seeks a different end.

He makes his way out of the city, taking a cab, then a ferry, then a train, and finally another cab—all in order to “finish the thing splendidly” (118) by jumping before a locomotive on Pennsylvania tracks:

He felt something strike his chest, and that his body was being thrown swiftly through the air, on and on, immeasurably far and fast, while his limbs were gently relaxed. Then, because the picture making mechanism was crushed, the disturbing visions flashed into black, and Paul dropped back into the immense design of things.

(121)

As Paul had earlier left the Schenley and “walked reluctantly toward the car tracks” (107) that would return him to Cordelia Street, so now he imagines himself again using a train to return to the reality of Cordelia Street, the basement, and the father—all of which constitute “the immense design of things” that Paul can escape only through the power of his imagination. It is an ending altogether bleak, darker than suicide because Paul can only imagine that escape. It is not that Paul must return to Pittsburgh or even that he dies—the alternatives that he sees before him in the (day)dream—it is that he never leaves Cordelia Street. His very power to tell stories, to create plots and pictures, is itself annihilated as his cinematic “picture making mechanism” is destroyed and the image fades to black.⁶ Paul's imagination is so constricted and circumscribed that he can picture himself only within that “immense design” over which he has no control and from which he can find no exit. Even in dreams he finds himself violently thrown back toward his home.

Has Paul succeeded in telling the story he planned: “suppose a day should come when his father would remember that night, and wish there had been no warning cry to stay his hand”? Certainly this reverie goes beyond the first scenario, in which his father simply shoots him because he thinks him a burglar. It is perhaps closer to the second scenario, where the father almost shoots him but stops at the last moment upon recognizing his son's voice. Yet this second plot tries to assign some self-hatred to his father, who would be “horrified to think how nearly he had killed him.” Paul refuses to let his story take that turn; the father remains incapable (according to Paul's vision of him) of caring enough about his son to shudder at the thought of almost killing him. The third scenario comes closest to the reverie that Paul actually has. Paul's father removes him from school and bans him from the concert hall and playhouse, and subsequently Paul becomes a thief, runs away, has to have the stolen funds repaid by his father, and ultimately kills himself rather than face his father⁷ and return to Cordelia Street. Paul's father has no pity for or understanding of his son's feelings, and (again, according to Paul's vision) would rather have shot his son that night in the basement than allow all the other events to occur. We should perhaps recall that Paul tells this story from his position atop a “soap-box” (108)—a word that almost always suggests someone with a particular point of view and a “case” to present. What better place for him to be as he spins out this tale about a father who cannot understand his son?

Notes

1. Du Bois—whose remarks are entirely unfavorable and generally unjustified by the contents of The Troll Garden (“a collection of freak stories that are either lurid, hysterical or unwholesome” [612])—never explains her curious statement.

2. With few exceptions, descriptions containing color occur in passages describing Paul's excitement and reverie; just as at these moments Paul himself “grew more and more vivacious and animated, and the colour came to his cheeks and lips” (105).

3. Given his long day and his exhaustion, perhaps he does fall asleep and dream all that follows. The narrator says only that Paul “did not try to sleep” (108; my emphasis), which leaves open the question of whether he actually did sleep. Hence I use the ambiguous “(day)dream.”

4. Marked by a roman “II” in the magazine version (McClure's Magazine 25 [May 1905]: 74-83) that appeared after The Troll Garden's publication earlier that year, although the magazine version represents an earlier state of the text; see Woodress (xxvii). Woodress does not, however, list this variant. Subsequent editions of the story also mark the shift with a blank line.

5. The New York clothes of course recall Paul's acute awareness of the way he dresses for both the faculty inquisition and his ushering job. It is no surprise that Paul's fascination with attire causes him to imagine himself in the role of “dresser” (110) to Charley Edwards.

6. It may be worth noting that America's first nickelodeon opened in 1905 in Pittsburgh, the city in which this story is set and where Cather had been living for a number of years when “Paul's Case” was first published. The “picture making mechanism” and the “visions [that] flashed into black” seem to me to derive from the language of cinematography, a language Cather no doubt would have been accustomed to seeing in the reviews of artistic events published alongside her own. The metaphor is all the more appropriate if Paul is merely creating a fiction.

7. Still one more reminder that Paul (in the basement) is hiding from his father.

Works Cited

Cather, Willa. “Paul's Case: A Study in Temperament.” The Troll Garden 102-21.

———. The Troll Garden. Ed. James Woodress. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1983.

du Bois, Bessie. Rev. of The Troll Garden. The Bookman 21 (1905): 612-14.

Woodress, James. Introduction. Cather, The Troll Garden xi-xxx.