Irretrievable by Theodor Fontane Page B

that most enviable and foolhardy of husbands? If I had such a wife, I should have chosen a career that kept me at home twenty-four hours a day. In any case, ship’s captain would have been my very last choice.”
    Frau Hansen was visibly amused, but drawing herself up with some difficulty, she replied, rather solemnly and with an attempt at maternal dignity: “Ah Baron, when you are always thinking of your husband, you never have time to think of anyone else. My late lamented husband was a captain too, and I never thought of anyone but him …”
    Pentz laughed: “Well, Frau Hansen, we are taught to believe everything a woman tells us, are we not? So I shall try to do so now.”
    So saying, he took Holk by the arm to lead him off to supper and the inevitable gossip at Vincent’s restaurant. Baron Erichsen followed with an expression on his face that seemed to disapprove of Pentz’s banter with the landlady, although he knew well enough that Pentz always behaved in this way. Frau Hansen for her part had already removed the shade from one of the two lamps and was holding it up for them until the three men had left the house.
    Pentz and Erichsen were contrasts, which did not prevent them from being on excellent terms with each other. In any case, everyone was on good terms with Pentz because not only did he wholeheartedly follow the proverb, “Be surprised at everything and angry about nothing” but he had pushed this precept even further and ceased being surprised at anything either. He believed above all in ride si sapis and saw everything from its funny side. In life, politics, and religion he gave the broadest possible interpretation to Pontius Pilate’s words: “What is truth?” and to become heated over moral questions—in the discussion of which he used regularly to quote the Greeks, Egyptians, Indians, and Circassians as representatives of every trend in life and love—seemed to him merely proof of an inadequate education and lack of familiarity with the “changing forms of human association,” as he liked to put it, holding up his gold-rimmed spectacles. Every time he did this you would see his tiny eyes gleaming quizzically and with a look of superiority. He was a bachelor in his sixties and, of course, a gourmand . The Princess liked him because he never bored her and because he discharged his functions, which were no sinecure, as if they were child’s play, yet with the greatest punctilio. This made it possible to disregard many other things about him and principally the fact that, in spite of all his merits, he was, in appearance, a figure of fun. As long as he was sitting at table, it was all right; but when he stood up, it could be seen that nature had treated him, in one sense, too meanly and, in another, too generously. His pedestal left much to be desired or, as the Princess expressed it, she had never seen a human being “who was less stilted than Baron Pentz.” As she never made this statement except when he had just said something that was, morally speaking, most “unstilted,” she was thus able to enjoy the double pleasure of ridiculing him and flattering him at one and the same time. He was an extremely nimble man and might, for this reason, have seemed destined for a long life but for his stoutness, his short neck, and his ruddy complexion, three things which betray the apoplectic. Erichsen could be considered Pentz’s exact counterpart: if the latter was an apoplectic, the former was a born hectic. He sprang from a consumptive family which, being very wealthy, had furnished the cemeteries of every health resort in the world with memorials in marble, syenite, and bronze. On these memorials the symbols of immortality were always the same: in Nice, San Remo, Funchal, and Cairo, yes, prosaically enough, even in Görbersdorf, a butterfly could be seen soaring heavenwards as if it were the armorial bearings of the