CHAPTER XVII. HANSERL OF THE YARD
I was soon to learn what being “sent into the yard” meant. Within a week that destiny was mine. Being so sent was the phrase for being charged to count the staves as they arrived in wagon-loads from Hungary,—oaken staves being the chief “industry” of Fiume, and the principal source of Herr Oppovich's fortune.
My companion, and, indeed, my instructor in this intellectual employment, was a strange-looking, dwarfish creature, who, whatever the season, wore a suit of dark yellow leather, the jerkin being fastened round the waist by a broad belt with a heavy brass buckle. He had been in the yard three-and-forty years, and though his assistants had been uniformly promoted to the office, he had met no advancement in life, but was still in the same walk and the same grade in which he had started.
Hans Sponer was, however, a philosopher, and went on his road uncomplainingly. He said that the open air and the freedom were better than the closeness and confinement within-doors, and if his pay was smaller, his healthier appetite made him able to relish plainer food; and this mode of reconciling things—striking the balance between good and ill—went through all he said or did, and his favorite phrase, “Es ist fast einerley,” or “It comes to about the same,” comprised his whole system of worldly knowledge.
If at first I felt the occupation assigned to me as an insult and a degradation, Hanserl's companionship soon reconciled me to submit to it with patience. It was not merely that he displayed an invariable good-humor and pleasantry, but there was a forbearance about him, and a delicacy in his dealing with me, actually gentlemanlike. Thus, he never questioned me as to my former condition, nor asked by what accident I had fallen to my present lot; and, while showing in many ways that he saw I was unused to hardship, he rather treated my inexperience as a mere fortuitous circumstance than as a thing to comment or dwell on. Han-serl, besides this, taught me how to live on my humble pay of a florin and ten kreutzers—about two shillings—daily. I had a small room that led out into the yard, and could consequently devote my modest salary to my maintenance. The straitened economy of Hans himself had enabled him to lay by about eight hundred florins, and he strongly advised me to arrange my mode of life on a plan that would admit of such a prudent saving.
Less for this purpose than to give my friend a strong proof of the full confidence I reposed in his judgment and his honor, I confided to his care all my earnings, and only begged he would provide for me as for himself; and thus Hans and I became inseparable. We took our coffee together at daybreak, our little soup and boiled beef at noon, and our potato-salad, with perhaps a sardine or such like, at night for supper; the “Viertelwein”—the fourth of a bottle—being equitably divided between us to cheer our hearts and cement good-fellowship on certainly as acrid a liquor as ever served two such excellent ends.
None of the clerks would condescend to know us. Herr Fripper, the cashier, would nod to us in the street, but the younger men never recognized us at all, save in some expansive moment of freedom by a wink or a jerk of the head. We were in a most subordinate condition, and they made us feel it.
From Hans I learned that Herr Oppovich was a widower with two children, a son and a daughter. The former was an irreclaimable scamp and vagabond, whose debts had been paid over and over again, and who had been turned out of the army with disgrace, and was now wandering about Europe, living on his father's friends, and trading for small loans on his family name. This was Adolph Oppovich. The girl—Sara she was called—was, in Hanserl's judgment, not much more to be liked than her brother. She was proud and insolent to a degree that would have been remarkable in a princess of a reigning house. From the clerks she exacted a homage that was positively absurd. It was not alone that they should always stand uncovered as she passed, but that if any had occasion to address her he should prelude what he had to say by kissing her hand, an act of vassalage that in Austria is limited to persons of the humblest kind.
“She regards me as a wild beast, and I am therefore spared this piece of servitude,” said Hans; and he laughed his noiseless uncouth laugh as he thought of his immunity.
“Is she handsome?” asked I.