So the next day Samuel met the Bremers. Their cottage was a little way out in the country, and they had a few trees about it and a flower bed. But the house was not large, and it was well filled with a family of nine children. Johann, the father, was big and florid, with bristling hair. He was marked in the town because he called himself a “Socialist,” but Samuel did not know that. His wife was a little mite of a woman, completely swamped by child-bearing. Most interesting to Samuel was Friedrich, who played the violin; a pale ascetic-looking boy of fifteen, with wavy hair and beautiful eyes.
Music was a serious rite with the Bremers. The father played the piano, and the next oldest son to Friedrich was struggling with a 'cello; and when they played, the whole family sat in the parlor, even the tiny tots, round-eyed and silent.
Samuel knew some “patriotic songs,” and a great number of hymns, and a few tunes that one heard at country dances. But such music as this was a new revelation of the possibilities of life. He listened in a transport of wonder and awe. Such wailing grief, such tumultuous longing, such ravishing and soul-tormenting beauty! Friedrich had only such technique as his father had been able to give him, together with what he had invented for himself; his bowings were not always correct, and he was weak on the high notes; but Samuel knew nothing of this—he was thinking of the music. And he needed no one to tell him about it—he needed no criticisms and no commentaries. Across the centuries the souls of Schubert and Beethoven spoke to him, telling their visions of the wonderful world of the spirit, toward which humanity is painfully groping.
It was impossible for him to keep from voicing his excitement, and this greatly delighted the Bremers, who craved for comprehension in a lonely place. His sympathy gave wings to their fervor, and they played the whole afternoon through, and then Johann invited them to stay to supper, so that they might play some more in the evening.
“You should haf been a musician,” he said to Samuel. “You vas made for it.”
They had a supper such as the boy had missed for some time; a great platter of cold boiled meat, and a bowl of hot gravy, and another bowl of mashed potatoes, with no end of bread and butter. Also there was some kind of a German pudding, and to the stranger's dismay, a pitcher of beer in front of Johann. After offering some to his guests, he drank it all, and also he ate a vast supper. Afterwards he dozed, while Friedrich played yet more wonderful music, and this gave Samuel a new insight into the life of the family, and into the wild and terrible longing that poured itself out in Friedrich's tones. The father was good-natured and sentimental, but sunk in grossness; and the mother was worn out with the care of her brood, and beneath all this burden the soul of the boy was crying frantically for life.
The exigencies of trade demanded endless variety of designs in carpets and rugs, and so all day Johann Bremer stood in front of a great sheet of cardboard, marked off in tiny numbered squares, on which he painted with many colors. For this he received thirty dollars a week, and his son received twelve dollars as his assistant—painting in the same colors upon all the squares of certain numbers, and so completing a symmetrical design. It was a very good job, and Johann prodded his son to devote his energies to the evolving of new designs. But the boy hated it all—thinking only of his music. And his music meant to him, not sentimental dreaming, but a passionate clutch into the infinite, a battle for deliverance from the bondage of the world. So Johann himself had been in his youth, when he had become a revolutionist, and before beer and gravy and domesticity had tamed him.
No one said a word about these things. It was all in the playing. And now and then Samuel stole a glance about the room and discovered yet another soul's tragedy. Sophie, too, was drinking in the music, and life had crept into her face, and her breath came quick and fast, and now and then she furtively brushed away a tear.
Afterwards, as they walked home, she said to Samuel, “I don't know if it's good for me to listen to music like that.”
“Why not?” he asked—“if it makes you happy.”