Chapter XVI: Part TWO (8)

“Surely you can understand that we can find doctors and lawyers to clear up this matter,” he said.

Peter was still silent, but he began to look as he had done in days gone by when he used to do a stroke of business. He winked with his right eye at Bernhard, whose face suddenly lit up:

“No, thank you, sir—that won’t work. That was too simple.”

Peter opened both eyes.

“You ought to say ‘Uncle,’ Bernhard,” he said, “you ought to say ‘Uncle.’”

Laura could not suppress a little anxious snigger. But Stellan did not move a feature. He came close up to Bernhard:

“I advise you to be careful,” he said. “I have collected some information about you in Majängen and know exactly how you stand with the police.”

Bernhard bit his nails, frightened and furious. He looked again at Peter, who now blinked with both his eyes, and lay down comfortably as if to listen to music. And Bernhard did not disappoint his expectations, but stared Stellan boldly in the face:

“No, Uncle dear, don’t come in here with the police for here you see one of the family....”

Stellan turned grey, but still controlled himself:

“I couldn’t think of bandying words with you. But if you behave decently we might perhaps compensate you for the vain hopes my brother may have raised. What would you say to a couple of thousand-crown notes and a ticket to America?”

Peter smiled:

“You want him to go to America, do you? So that he might join Laura’s Georg, is that it? Well, Bernhard, what do you say to America and the cash? A fine offer, eh?”

“No, thanks, America does not suit me at all.”

Peter wagged his head, filled with paternal pride:

“The lad is no fool. I needn’t be ashamed of him. I am damned if I don’t envy you when I think of all the money you will get.”

Now Hedvig’s voice was suddenly heard again from the corner:

“You should never have taken up with that woman, Peter. You should never have taken up with that woman.”

Stellan grew furious. His thin bony hands trembled and his voice broke. The brutality of the barrack-room broke through his outer shell. It was terrible to see the aristocratic mask fall so suddenly:

“Shut up, you old goat!” he shouted to Hedvig. Then he held his clenched fist before Bernhard’s face:

“And you, you damned young scoundrel, be off in less than no time, or the police will fetch you! Get out now!”

But Bernhard did not get out at all. With this tone he was familiar. It frightened him less than the icy authority before. He jumped closer to the bed and lowered his head between his shoulders ready for a grip at the throat or a blow at the back of the head. He was evidently prepared for war as one understood it amongst the youth of Majängen.

Peter rose. Yes, he rose up in bed. His pale puffy face was covered by a broad grin:

“Bravo,” he grunted. “This is better than I thought it would be. I am damned if I am not beginning to feel quite well again.”

He was not unlike the man from Chicago who fainted when he came into the pure air but revived again when somebody held a rotten herring under his nose.

It seemed, as a matter of fact, as if death had for a moment withdrawn from the room before this last grotesque phase of egoism. Poor overworked death in the third year of the world war! Coarsened and banalised by the crude slaughter of engines of destruction and by the horribly laconic press announcements. Talk no more of the twinkling evening star and the purifying effect of suffering or of clear vision at the moment of farewell. What an age! when men have grown so empty and hard that they even know no fear. It is as if they no longer existed themselves, but only their machines and their money. Egoism driven to extremes turns into something almost like its opposite. It dies the death of cold, around a soulless mass of cold metal. Life—spontaneous happy and suffering life—is nothing, its end cannot therefore be anything either....

Peter was lying with ruined kidneys and was on the point of collapse. But anything so fine as death, the good old death, he had never met, and was never to meet.

He just fell to pieces.

A first milder paroxysm had come already. Laura suddenly seized Stellan’s arm and pointed to the bed. Panic made her mass of flesh tremble. It was an ugly, cowardly fright:

“Come, let us go!” she panted and pulled her skirts round her as if she had seen a mouse. “I want to get away from this at once!”

Peter had sunk back on the pillow. He moaned heavily and spasms passed over his shapeless face, whilst one hand groped about on his chest and the other contracted like a claw.

But Stellan pulled himself together with a furious effort. His face grew cold and hard. This was the last chance. Now the last card was being played. He pushed Laura away and bent quickly over Peter with a low but penetrating whisper:

“You are not going to steal from us and make a scandal, Peter. The slightest effort will be the end. Let us separate as friends!”

Peter struggled with his growing weakness. He forced the words out with a tremendous effort:

“The will ... clear ... all clear....”

Stellan bent still lower. It sounded as if he had wanted to push each word like a probe into the invalid’s conscience:

“We shall oppose the will ... there will be a lawsuit ... do you hear, a lawsuit.”

“I shall ... win ... win....”

“You will be declared of unsound mind. The will will be declared null.”

“No ... I shall win ... win....”

And it sounded as if a secret malicious satisfaction irresistibly overcame his cramp and pain. Peter the Boss will bring an action, Peter the Boss will win. What the deuce does it matter then if he happens to be dead.

Laura had already fled. Stellan followed slowly, after having telephoned for the doctor. Hedvig came last. In the door she turned, stared at her dying brother and mumbled again obstinately, like a monomaniac:

“You should never have taken up with that woman, Peter. You should never have taken up with that woman....”

But Bernhard had sunk down on a chair by the bed, pale, sick, red-eyed. In his bold restless eyes there appeared something like tears. Youth, even neglected and criminal youth, has always a softer fibre. The real blindness, cruelty, and sterility lies on the other side of the midday line.

A few days later Peter the Boss went to sleep, having never wakened again while he lived. His egoism survived him. Blind and unredeemed it still survived in his stupid cunning will. “My money shall rule them,” he had thought. “They shan’t pass over Peter the Boss so easily.” And neither did they.

The will showed that he had not taken any steps legally to recognise his son. He simply made him his sole heir—but with the important and particularly sound reservation that he should not dissipate the fortune but only draw the interest. To this will were attached, however, a lot of strange conditions which really seemed to have been added only to give the disappointed heirs a tempting opportunity. Thus the heir, if he wanted to retain the inheritance, must always remain clean shaven like the testator when alive; never travel in motor cars; never back any bills or go abroad. Strange also was the way he had remembered his dear sisters and brother. To Stellan was bequeathed Peter’s watch, an old silver turnip which the lord of Trefvinge would not even touch with his fingers. Hedvig got the humble stock of old clothes of the deceased, and Laura was consoled with the yacht “Laura,” laid up in the yard at Ekbacken with all its inventory, as for instance, anchor, buoy, ensign staff, and glass rack, all in memory of her beloved first husband, Herman Hermansson.

This will was the tombstone of Peter the Boss, and his relations celebrated its unveiling by a long and scandalous lawsuit in which nothing of the Selamb nature was hidden from the eyes of the world. Against Levy, whom Peter had had the good idea of appointing executor of the will and who now got a welcome opportunity for revenge both on Laura and Hedvig, a whole army of lawyers and psychologists was mobilised. The Selamb brother and sisters were now no longer afraid of scandal. These people, who were really choking with money, tore every shred of cover from the deceased and scratched the brain out of his skull, in order to fling it on the judge’s table. The whole press of the country echoed these magnificent disclosures. From the court of first instance to that of final instance this comedy of greed dragged its way along, but Peter was too cunning for his opponents and won his lawsuit in the end, as he had said. Yes, one may really say that it was Peter who won and not his son. That young rogue had, as might have been expected, not been able to support his good fortune, but by the time of the final settlement of the case, already lay in hospital, having drunk himself to death.

Already during his lifetime Peter had been moderately well known, but now under the plain stone out in the New Cemetery, he grew to a type of power. He was accepted and quoted. People told anecdotes about him, laughed at those he had tricked, and shrugged their shoulders at his enemies. The masses in the end always capitulate to a scoundrel of coarser calibre than themselves. And when nowadays a poor honest bourgeois who has been working hard the whole week, takes his Sunday walk beyond the toll bar and catches sight of Selambshof, he forgets all that was done up there in that robbers’ stronghold in order to hamper his own life and make it more difficult and expensive. And he points at the false Gothic over the edge of the forest and exclaims:

“Look! That’s where that scoundrel Peter Selamb lived! Do you know what he used to say? ‘God will surely feed the hawk,’ he used to say. And that is true enough—for he cheated the town of a good round sum. Twelve millions he left behind him, that scoundrel, Peter Selamb!”

There is secret admiration in his voice. The heart swells so strangely in the poor little bourgeois heart, just as does the heart of a soldier when you tell him about Napoleon.

Here ends this book, which has told of such as prefer to hunt alone.

Georg Hermansson is at the moment of writing already a prominent engineer in Philadelphia. As far as we can see, he will soon have to return home to take over the greater part of the spoil. Who knows? perhaps he will one day fight the battle of civilisation with the ill-gotten wealth of the Selambs against those who hunt in flocks. The best days of the Selambs’ system are now over and the egoism of the masses is perhaps now the greater danger.

THE END

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● Transcriber’s Notes:
○ Missing or obscured punctuation was silently corrected.
○ Typographical errors were silently corrected.
○ Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation were made consistent only
when a predominant form was found in this book.
○ Text that was in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_);
text that had extra inter-character spacing by “plus” signs (+The
New Day+).