Victor Ollnee's Discipline

by Hamlin Garland

The manager's smile vanished. He left the address half finished. "So you are the son they spoke of?" he said, with a cold, keen glance.

"Yes, I am," Victor boldly answered.

He closed his book. "I don't believe we can trade," he announced. "Of course I don't consider all mediums frauds and liars, but this house is very particular about its help—"

Victor turned and walked away, bitterly rebellious of soul and disheartened. For a time his anger burned so hotly within him that he meditated taking the train and leaving the city and all it held behind him. Again and again his thought returned to the picture his gentle little mother had made as she had said good-by to him at the head of the stairs. To accuse her of conscious deception was like accusing a sweet girl of infanticide. How could she build up a system of fraudulent fortune-telling, so intricate, so subtle, that it baffled the eye of the reporter, who confessed that he had not been able to detect the trickery. "It is only by induction, by inference, that one gets at the modus operandi," he admitted.

In his perturbation he walked away to the east and soon came out upon the lake-front. A bunch of men and boys of all types and sizes were playing ball on the barren ground, and with the athlete's undying love of the sport he rose and edged into the game. He could not resist showing his prowess by means of a few curves, and the crowd with instant perception began to take a vivid interest in him.

A half-hour of this restored his good-nature and he returned to the cañons to the west, determined to find an opening somewhere. He was never dismissed rudely—he was too big and well-dressed for that—but the fact that he had no experience shut him out in most cases, and for the rest the departments were filled with salesmen. Twice when he seemed about to be taken on, his name and his mothers reputation shut the door of opportunity in his face.

At four o'clock he started slowly homeward, discouraged, not so much by his failure as by the fact that everybody seemed to have a knowledge of the article in the Star. It was evident that even when a manager did not at the moment make the connection between his name and Mrs. Ollnee's it would certainly come out later and he would be called upon to defend himself and his mother from the sneers and jeers of his fellow-salesmen. "I'm a marked man, that's sure," he said, in dismay.

All day his mind had dwelt in flashes on the glorious life at Winona, but now his memory of it was poisoned by the thought that he had been a pensioner on the bounty of Mrs. Joyce. "The easy thing would be to change my name and skip out for the plains," he said again, "but I won't. I'll stay and fight it out right here some way."

He was passing the public library at the moment and was moved to go in and look up the "want ads" in the papers. Ten minutes' reading of these filled him with despair. There were so many wanting work! His feet were tired with walking and his brain weary with the movement of the street, therefore he moved on to the reference room where he found an atmosphere of study that was very grateful.

Accustomed to work of this kind, he asked the attendant to bring him catalogues, and was soon surrounded with books and magazines which dealt with the modern study of psychic phenomena. He fell upon one or two of these which gave exhaustive generalizations, and he was astounded to find that European men of science of the loftiest type were engaged in the study of precisely the same phenomena which his mother claimed to produce.