And all along the street there were small shops with panes of leaded glass and little bells that tinkled as one entered. Some had old wooden signs that hung out in the streets before them, and some had Gothic lettering of rich faded colors on the wall of the house above the shop. The windows were crammed to bursting with fat succulent looking sausages, rich pastries, chocolate, rolls and bread, flasks of wine or bundles of cigars made of strong coarse looking tobacco. And Jack knew that when one entered the shop the proprietor would greet him with a long, droll, gutturally friendly “Mo-o-o-rgen!”

Jack did not know why he was walking in this street, but he knew that a meeting with someone he had known was impending, and this certain knowledge increased the feeling of joy and security he had already. And suddenly he saw them all about him in the street—the friends and schoolmates of his youth—and he knew instantly why he was there among them.

And now another curious fact appeared. Here were the companions of his early years in the grammar school, and here were those he had known later in the gymnasium. He knew and recognized them instantly, and yet he saw with a sense of sorrow and without surprise that all of them had grown old. He had seen none of them since his childhood, and now the children he had known had grown into old men with worn eyes and wrinkled faces. Jack saw this instantly and yet it caused him no surprise; when he looked at them he could see they were old men but he seemed to look straight through their old faces into the faces of the children he had known. And the moment that he saw them they came to him and grasped him by the hand. They spoke to him with kindly friendship and with no surprise or questioning, and there was something infinitely sorrowful, weary, and resigned in their voices.

Then they were sitting all together at a pleasant table in an old beer house, looking with quiet eyes into the street. The waiter came to take their order, and they ordered beer. Jack saw that the waiter was a heavily built man of middle age who walked with a heavy limp. His head was shaven, he wore a long apron that went from neck to ankles and that had been woven out of a coarse blue thread. The man had a kindly brutal face, and the same quiet and sorrowful eyes the others had. He said “Was soll es sein?” in a gruff and friendly tone, taking their orders with a rough male friendliness and limping away to fill them.

They sat at a table of old dark wood, scored and carved with many deep initials and shining with the cleanliness of countless scrubbings. The place was vast and deep; it was full of old dark woods and cool depths, and the strong wet reek of beer came freshly on the air.

With Jack sitting at the table and looking out into the street were Walter Grauschmidt, Paul Heyst, and Ludwig Berniker. Ludwig had become a mountain of a man, with a bald, shining, completely hairless head and a swinish face. And yet the head and face had also a profound and massive strength, a curious and tragic mixture of swinish gluttony and lonely and sorrowful thought, as if the beast and the angel of the race had come together there. Jack had seen these faces in his youth ten thousand times, and they had haunted his memory with the enigma of their bestial and hateful swinishness and their massive and lonely power and dignity, but now he noticed also that Ludwig’s head was disfigured at the temple with a clean bullet hole, bluish and bloodless at the edges, and drilled cleanly through his brain. Then he remembered having heard that Ludwig who had served throughout the war as an officer of infantry had been killed, or it was thought, had killed himself, in the week before the Armistice. Yet neither this fact, nor the clean bullet hole in Ludwig’s temple, caused Jack any surprise whatever.

Instead, a quiet and certain knowledge, an old and sorrowful acceptation which had no need or words, seemed to bind them all together as they sat at their pleasant table, looking out into the street. Then, as they sat there at their beer, looking with quiet eyes into the street, Jack saw the figure of his once hated enemy Hartmann, stumping by. And Hartmann, too, had grown old and battered. He also walked with a heavy limp, which he had got in the war, he was poorly and shabbily dressed, and he wore the flat cap of a working man.

Yet Jack knew him instantly, and with the same strange recognition that had no surprise in it. He jumped to his feet crying sharply, “Albert, Albert!”, and Hartmann turned slowly, blinking and peering from right to left through small worn rheumy eyes like an old bewildered animal. Then Jack ran out into the street to greet him. But the sense of triumph, the moment of victory, which he thought would be the fruit of the encounter, had vanished. He was conscious only of a feeling of great warmth and affection for Hartmann, and of the sorrowful presence of time. Then Hartmann knew him, and to his horror he saw him make a movement towards his cap as if to take it off.