She was the first person he informed of it.
“Farewell! We shall not see each other again!” He spoke quite coolly, almost callously, and he left her cowering on the sofa and weeping hysterically. He felt a free man again. The abominable shackles had fallen from him.
If he had seen Frau Kahle five minutes after he had left her he would not even have retained for her a vestige of that first tenderness that had swept over him that night in the Casino garden. For when he had retired, and she had heard his step on the flagging of the hall below, she had quickly risen and peered, from behind the lace curtains, into the street after his vanishing figure. Then she had sat down at the piano and intoned a merry Strauss waltz.
But then she reflected that they might call her heartless. So she had indited a long, passionate farewell letter to him. He showed it, the night before his going, to Borgert at the Casino. They were all his guests that night. Borgert had screamed with laughter.
“What a devilish smart little woman she is, after all,” he had exclaimed. And then, poising in mid-air his champagne glass, he said, nodding to Pommer:
“Here’s to her and her simpleton!”
He spoke from experience.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] Masovians, the population of certain districts in eastern Prussia; they are of Polish race.—Tr.
[7] “Turk’s blood” (“Türkenblut”) is the name of a mixture of English porter, brandy, and French champagne very much in vogue in the army.—Tr.