“Well, Pommer,” he shouted satirically, “how is your headache? And how did you find things at Kahle’s?—everything forgiven?”
“Oh, yes, everything forgiven,” answered Pommer, demurely, without going into any further details.
“Excellent. Was a wise thing for you to do to take counsel with an elder comrade, my dear fellow. Well, I am glad for your sake everything ended well.”
“Yes, thanks to you,” said Pommer; and the two shook hands and parted.
Pommer went home, well satisfied with himself.
He fancied that all was now over between him and Frau Kahle. His acquaintance with women of her stamp had never been extensive, and to read the soul of one so utterly false and grossly sensual as this inveterate coquette, was quite beyond the ability of Lieutenant Pommer, analysis of his own or anybody else’s character not being his strong point.
He had, however, miscalculated Frau Kahle’s fascinations over his unsophisticated self, and decidedly underestimated her craving for admiration. He was made aware of this when he next met her, on the day following. She greeted him with a smile so bewitching and a half-expressed sense of intimacy so flattering to his amour propre, that he was unable to resist. Soon these two became the talk of the little town. No matter if Pommer, looking at his inner self within the quiet retreat of his own bachelor quarters, bitterly bewailed his renewed fall from grace, her influence over the coarser fibre in his being easily triumphed over his qualms of conscience.
He frequently met Borgert during this period, but the latter, far from training once more on him the battery of his eloquence, contented himself with some facetious remark or with a Mephistophelian grin. And for Kahle himself, he was probably the only one in the garrison—as is the fate of husbands too often in such cases—who was not in the slightest aware of the “goings-on” of his nominal partner in the joys and sorrows of life. And, besides, his tasks as chairman of the Casino’s house committee kept him, together with his official duties, practically away from home all day long, and frequently far into the night.
Pommer was, as we have seen, not precisely of delicate stuff, either bodily or in his psychic makeup. But the chains he was wearing nevertheless galled him, and he not seldom manœuvred with his charmer to obtain release; but all in vain. More than once he thought seriously of writing to Captain Kahle himself, confessing his guilt, glossing over her own share of it, and offering all the reparation in his power. That would mean, of course, exposing his own precious life to the unerring bullet of the captain; but even that outlook appeared to him preferable to his present life of deceit. He now regretted that he had not followed, the morning after the Casino hop, his first impulse of making a clean breast of it to Captain Kahle. Thus weeks dragged on, and there was no prospect of a change in a situation which gradually became intolerable to him.
But suddenly, without his having done anything to bring it about, the day came that granted him escape from his degrading entanglement. The imperial order arrived, promoting him to the grade of First Lieutenant and transferring him to another garrison, far in the interior of the country.