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.
Colophon
Downstream
was published in 1920 by
Sigfrid Siwertz.
It was translated from Swedish in 1923 by
E. Classen.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Robin Whittleton,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2019 by
Tim Lindell, Barry Abrahamsen, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Sommarnöje,
a painting completed in 1886 by
Anders Zorn.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
May 10, 2022, 3:49 p.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
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