A Little Garrison Part 7

"Accident made me, last night, witness to a scene which I am sorry to say, Herr Comrade, I cannot otherwise describe than shocking. It was in the most secluded spot of the grounds near the Casino. The lady in question--"

"You need proceed no further, Herr Comrade. I know perfectly well that I am to blame."

"May I ask you for an explanation?"

"I was intoxicated. That is the sole explanation I can offer."

"A strange one. Why, if you cannot drink without losing your senses,--why, then, do you drink at all?"

"The fact that I was intoxicated was due in large measure to the very gentleman I am now addressing, who would not--"

"You need not go into such details," Borgert interrupted him. "You do not seem to understand the gravity of your offence, and it seems necessary that I should enlighten you as a younger comrade on that point."

Pommer felt indignant at this hypocritical lecture, but before he could reply to it Borgert continued:

"Your offence is the most serious against comradeship which can be conceived. Really, it would be my duty to call the attention of the lady's husband to it if I did not trust in your sense of honor to rectify the matter before any more mischief is done. If you will promise me to go at once and ask the lady's pardon, and to do all in your power to avoid any further cause for scandal, I will on my part forbear to mention what I saw. You must know, of course, that to tell Captain Kahle would mean a challenge, a duel, your enforced resignation from the army, and maybe your death,--for he is a good shot."

Borgert was very dramatic as he said this. The role of an austere prophet, calling a sinner to repentance and amends, had all the spice of novelty for him. Inwardly he smiled at himself, but outwardly he drew up his tall, sinewy frame to its full height, and cast a hypnotizing stare at the man before him, now slowly recovering his usual sober frame of mind. And as the sense of his wrong-doing began to overpower poor Pommer, he bowed his towzled head in misery. Two big tears crept slowly down his tanned cheeks.

Borgert went on:

"It is, of course, your duty to go at once to the outraged husband as well, and to confess your guilt. As I know Captain Kahle, he is not the man to withstand a direct appeal to his clemency if couched in appropriately contrite terms. If you will pledge me your word of honor to do as requested and to obtain the pardon of husband and wife, you may count on my silence."

Pommer glanced up. Tumultuous feelings were surging in his breast, and so rapid had been the revulsion from his first sentiments when Borgert had opened the conversation, that what was now uppermost in his mind was grat.i.tude for this discreet and wise friend. He rose, and with a pathetic gesture stretched forth his great paw.

"Here is my hand," he said, with a hitch in his voice. "I promise."

Borgert clasped it a moment.

"Thanks, many thanks, for your sympathy and aid in this sorry business," the junior mumbled, and surrept.i.tiously wiped a briny drop out of the corner of his eye.

Borgert left, very much satisfied with himself. He had now among the younger officers of the regiment another one who would henceforth swear by him. He noisily clanked down the shaky wooden stairs of the humble house wherein Pommer occupied narrow quarters. And Frau Kahle, too, was now in his power, he gleefully reflected. Besides all that, there was something positively piquant about the little adventure,--something which would frequently hereafter furnish him with pleasant innuendoes and hints, understood only by those immediately concerned, and which would supply him, Borgert, with an endless fund of amus.e.m.e.nt. He intensely enjoyed this propitious ending to his machinations.

Humming a tune, and feeling in the best of spirits, he went home, gave his servant sabre, cloak, and helmet, and mounted the stairs leading up to Frau Leimann's apartments.

She was not alone. The adjutant was present. Muller, in fact, had shirked his duties to-day, the colonel being off on a hunting trip in the adjacent extensive forest, having been invited thereto by the royal head forester commanding that district. Frau Leimann greeted Borgert warmly, and while the latter and the adjutant stepped to the window, looking at the wife of Captain Konig and Lieutenant Bleibtreu, who were riding past the house on horseback, Borgert seized the opportunity and deftly appropriated the pretty woman's hands, which he kissed pa.s.sionately.

Then he told them of his interview with Pommer,--told it in such droll terms and with such an abundance of mimicry, that his two hearers could not help laughing immoderately. The picture of ungainly, rough Pommer being in the sentimental stage and a prey to a lacerated conscience was too exquisitely ludicrous.

Meanwhile Pommer sat at his desk, laboriously inditing a letter to his mother, to whom he opened his whole heart, as in duty bound.

Several of the strongest pa.s.sages in his letter were panegyrics on his new-won friend, Borgert, whom he limned in colors so brilliant that the original would indeed have had great trouble in recognizing himself in the portrait.

The lieutenant had by this time calmed down a good deal, and the blurred images of the past evening resolved themselves, one after another, into sane recollections. He now distinctly recalled the part in the ugly intrigue played by the woman; how she had skilfully led him on to make advances; how she had smiled encouragingly at his terms of endearment; how she had "fished" for dubious compliments, and how she had, above all, so alluringly made the most intimate confidences to him as to her marital troubles and as to her status of a _femme incomprise_. Really, he thought after quiet reflection, he himself was not so much to blame in this affair, disgraceful as it doubtless was when all was said and done. For the woman herself, a change of feeling took place simultaneously. The tender pity he had felt for her in his maudlin condition made room for something akin to contempt and dislike. She certainly could not be a pure woman, a faithful wife and mother, he thought, thus to invite, almost provoke, the pa.s.sionate regard of a man much younger and less experienced than herself,--a man, too, whom she had known but slightly and conventionally hitherto.

In his inmost consciousness he had almost absolved himself from guilt in the matter. And as to writing to her husband, or confronting him with the raw tale of her and his indiscretion, as Borgert had suggested, why, the more he thought of it, the less advisable a step it seemed to him, from every point of view. However, a promise was a promise, and he would keep it.

He donned his full regimentals, and issued forth at the right time for a visit of the kind.

He did not find Kahle himself in, he being still away at squadron drill. But his wife flew to meet him as soon as the parlor door had closed behind the announcing servant, and her reception was indeed such an affectionate and even enthusiastic one that the words of penitence perforce died on his lips. She drew him toward her on the low lounge, and exuberantly babbled on about the comfort, the delight his confidence had brought her. There was not the slightest word said by her to show that she had disapproved his approaches now that the glamour of the moment, the enervating effects of close communion in the warm air of a spring night, were gone. Coquettishly she plied all her wiles to captivate poor Pommer anew. His pulses hammered, his senses were aflame; but he remained master of himself, and sternly he resolved to sever these equivocal relations with a woman whom he could no longer respect. The weak, purblind man had been steeled against further temptation by seeing a few hours ago the abyss yawning at his feet, in which an illicit love had threatened to engulf him forever.

The image of his mother, n.o.ble type of womanhood, rose before his mind, and he remained strong.

Frau Kahle, on her part, at last becoming convinced that all her arts were thrown away on this iceberg, suddenly changed her tactics, and dismissed her visitor in somewhat abrupt fashion. She swept from the room, leaving him to find his way out. Only the intoxicating perfume which she used by preference lingered a moment longer in the close air of the room as the lieutenant sought his way out; but despite a curious feeling of defeat which he could not help instinctively feeling, there was subdued exultation in his heart. His brow was serene as, at the next crossing of the street, he encountered Borgert, who hailed him:

"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, a.n.a.lysis 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 coa.r.s.er 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 manuvred 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.

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, pa.s.sionate 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 gla.s.s, he said, nodding to Pommer:

"Here's to her and her simpleton!"

He spoke from experience.

CHAPTER IV

THE CASE OF SERGEANT SCHMITZ

Late in the forenoon of a raw day in autumn Vice-Sergeant-Major Roth was seated in his comfortably heated room, and near him Sergeant Schmitz. Each was enjoying a cup of coffee.

The quarters occupied by Roth were situated on the second story of the regimental barracks, and made at first sight the impression of elegance and almost wealth, precisely as though the occupant were a member of the upper ten thousand.[8] It required a closer examination to become convinced that a good deal of these apparently costly trappings, as well as the furniture and wall decorations, was not what it seemed, and that, to produce by all means the effect sought for, taste and appropriateness had been sacrificed. The wall paper of arabesques in green and blue, which the government had furnished, did not harmonize with the hangings or carpets. The paintings on the wall were cased in heavy gilt or oak frames, so unskilfully placed as to conceal in spots the very wall itself. Above the scarlet plush sofa hung a reproduction of Lenbach's "Prince Bismarck," and to right and left of it abominable oil chromos representing horses. Against the opposite wall stood a piano in stained oak, showing glittering silver-plated candelabra. Neither Roth himself nor his worthy better half, formerly saleswoman in a shop, possessed the slightest knowledge of the art of manipulating such an instrument. But there was a story connected with this showy piece of furniture--a story that even now, years after the events themselves occurred, brought tears of rage to the eyes of the "Vice." To the young corporal of his own squadron who on Sunday afternoons strummed on the piano, he used to say in pathetic accents, that those "one year's volunteers"[9] had treated him most outrageously; and from his own point of view he was probably right.