This paper addresses the communication of polygon mesh deformation data for remote haptic interaction with simulated deformable objects. In the studied client-server architecture, the server computes the resource-demanding finite-element-based object deformation at a low temporal update rate and transmits the resulting polygon mesh deformation data to the clients. There, the received deformation data is used to locally render the virtual environment visually and haptically at the required rates of 30 Hz and 1 kHz, respectively. We propose a low-delay lossy compression scheme for the transmission of the 3D polygon mesh deformation data, which considers the haptic and visual modalities individually. Objective and subjective evaluations show that the proposed compression scheme achieves a compression ratio of 11:1, while keeping the introduced visual and haptic distortion below the respective human perception thresholds.