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It seemed, as a matter of fact, as if death had for a moment withdrawn from the room before this last grotesque phase of egoism.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
