Imperium Read Free

grimaced—he easily became queasy—then the midday bell was ringing, and Otto took hold of his arm gently and firmly; but now he really must do him the honor of dining with him.
    Hartmut Otto was a moral person in the actual meaning of the term, even if his civility had sprung from the preceding century and he couldn’t muster much understanding for the new age now dawning, the protagonist of which would be August Engelhardt. To be sure, the bird hunter had read progressive scientists, like Alfred Russel Wallace, Lamarck, and Darwin, indeed with a certain meticulousness, especially their taxonomic essays, but he not only lacked faith in modernity as a cumulative process; he was also incapable of recognizing and accepting a radical spirit (as Wallace and Darwin had been, for instance), should he encounter him in person, perchance on a sea voyage, as he had just now. Engelhardt’s vegetarianism, as we shall soon see, was anathema enough to Otto.
    Engelhardt begrudgingly allowed himself to be led to dine in the first-class salon. There—where one sat in heavy neo-Gothic chairs, the seat backs of which were stuffed with horsehair, while resting one’s gaze on gilt-framed reproductions of Dutch masters—upon Otto’s signal to the Malaysian steward, he was served, quite contrary to Engelhardt’s usual daily eating habits, a plate of steaming spaetzle and a pork chop with a sumptuous brown gravy. Engelhardt looked with bald revulsion upon the piece of meat sitting there before him in its bed of noodles, its edges an iridescent blue.
    Otto, who was essentially a good-natured man, thought his counterpart was probably intimidated, since Engelhardt, as a second-class passenger, didn’t know how he would pay for what was for him an extravagant midday repast, and he invited him to eat of the pork chop, yes, by all means, please, it was his treat, to which Engelhardt, politely but with the firmness of his (and Schopenhauer’s, and Emerson’s) conscience replied, no, thank you, he was an avowed vegetarian in general and a frugivore in particular, and might he perhaps request a green salad, not dressed, without salt and pepper.
    The bird dealer paused, replaced the knife and fork he had already been holding over his plate to its right and left, chuckled, dabbed at his upper lip and mustachio with his napkin, and then burst into a barking, bleating, even snorting fit of laughter. Tears sprang from his eyes. First his napkin sailed to the floor, then a plate shattered, and all the while Otto repeated the words salad and frugivore again and again, turning a purplish red as if he were about to asphyxiate. While those at the neighboring table leapt up to rid him, with sweeping blows to the back, of what they supposed was a piece of bone lodged in his trachea, August Engelhardt sat across from him looking at the floor, waggling the sandal laced to his left ankle with manic swiftness. A Chinese cook came running from the galley, a dripping whisk still in his hand.
    Two parties formed and began to argue most vigorously. Engelhardt heard a few bits clearly amid the tumult; they concerned his, Engelhardt’s, right to refuse the consumption of meat. What’s more, they spoke of savages—if one may even still call them that, said one of the plantation owners. Had things gotten so bad now that a German in the protectorate was no longer permitted to distinguish a wog from a Rhinelander? Yet we ought to be happy, another said, to have vegetable products listed on the menu, especially as large parts of our merry island empire have long since returned to anthropophagy after we so arduously weaned the savages off it with Draconian measures. Oh, nonsense! Old hat! came the opposing shout. And yet, and yet—only four months ago they ate a padre over on Tumleo among the Steyler Missionary Sisters. The body parts of the man of God that weren’t consumed immediately were pickled, shipped up the coast, and sold in the Dutch East