Eberhard, Albrecht, and Ulrich, wandering students, came into Hauptberg on a winter noon, and knowing the town, made straight for the Golden Eagle, an inn loved by all vagabond students, young and not so young, “new men,” “poets” as against schoolmen, lovers of the pagan knowledge, droppers of corrosives upon the existing order, prophets of a world behind this-world, the humanist left. The Golden Eagle stood in an angle of the town wall, high red-roofed, shining-windowed, kept by Hans Knapp and Bertha his wife. The December sun made vivid all the red roofs of Hauptberg, it turned the huge cathedral into something lighter than stone, it tossed nodding sheaves of light among the prosperous burghers’ houses, it overwrote the walls of a monastery of Augustinian Hermits, it added scroll and circle of its own to the ornamented storied front of the mighty guild hall; and garmented the winter trees in the university close. The bright and nipping air put ripe apple colour into the faces of the various street-farers. These moved quickly, with bodies slightly slanted, arms folded; if they were well-to-do, in woolen and furred mantles. The poor also moved quickly, with unmantled shoulders shrugged together. The town musicians were somewhere at practice. One heard a great drum and horns.
In a number of the street-farers showed a degree of excitement, an eagerness to exchange speech and views with acquaintances, or even with non-acquaintances. This itch was evident in many who encountered the incoming, wandering students. “From Wittenberg way? And what is the news?”
Eberhard moved, a sinewy, bronzed, square-faced, blue-eyed fellow, in a green jerkin and a brown cloak. Ulrich was solid and blond, to the eye a benevolent young burgher, and to better apprehension a ramping dare-devil. Albrecht, slight, dark, and quick as a lizard, was the “poet,” with emphasis. He carried upon his back Virgil and Terence and Ovid, Cicero, and Seneca and Juvenal bound in a pack with Averroës, Avicenna, and Avicebron, and when he was not in earnest made good love songs and praised the vine. When he was in earnest he treated with vitriol the garden of Holy Church, much overgrown with weeds.
The three were in wild spirits. They had news and they gave it. Some who received were terribly angered thereby, and some took with more or less evident pleasure, with a kind of half-frightened exultation. One or two said that wandering students were bred by the father of lies. A student from the university saying this more loudly than was prudent, Ulrich, moving amiably forward, took him by his girdle, swung him overhead, and set him—plank!—in the gutter skimmed with ice. A brawl threatened, Ulrich ready enough to stay for it. But Albrecht cried out that he was in ecstasy, that he had a vision of the Golden Eagle, that Hans Knapp was putting a log on the fire, Frau Knapp drawing the ale, and Gretchen Knapp setting a pasty on the table! So they swung from the drenched student and his somewhat timid backers. They had made miles that morning, and hungered and thirsted, and they loved the Golden Eagle. That is Albrecht and Ulrich loved it; Eberhard was a stranger in Hauptberg.
Here was the steep red roof, and the swinging, creaking Eagle sign, and the benches in the sun beneath the eaves, and the open door, and out of the door coming a ruddy light, a good smell, and a sound of singing.
“That,” said Albrecht, “is the voice of Conrad Devilson!”
“Where Conrad is, is Walther von Langen.”
“Good meeting with them both!”
Conrad Devilson beat with his tankard upon the table of the Golden Eagle.
“That day of joy,
That lovely day,
When Aristotle,
Thomas Aquinas,
Albertus Magnus,
William of Occam,
Duns Scotus,
Peter the Lombard.
The monk,
The priest,
John Tetzel,
The Archbishop of Mainz,
The bull Exurge Domine, and
The Power of Rome
Shall pass away!”