The hero lay dead

The hero lay dead. Still almost a boy, his hair, blood-matted, was carelessly blown across his white forehead; even a mother’s fussing care could not have kept it in place. Back at the hotel his bride was inconsolable. Desperately I sought some words of comfort, the futility of all words henceforth accepted, as the decay of his hard bright flesh in death had to be accepted. The words I sought were Rilke’s - from the Elegies yet I could not remember where, and turned the pages as she wept silently. The tenth seemed likely; but no, the line evaded me, as the meaning of his death seemed to evade me. The fourth, the ninth both failed to elicit the longed for passage. I all but lost heart.

Word had arrived, the ferry must depart; was steaming at the jetty with one place left for the heartbroken girl still sitting opposite me in the twilight room, - faded, a daguerreotype seeking some word, some gesture of farewell before her departure for the mainland. They could wait no longer, yet she seemed unwilling to go, seeking my face above the book, her eyes full of dumb sorrow. Suddenly the words were before my eyes, black on the white page; as if I had made them myself, out of her unbearable grief. Of course - the sixth I should have known. She, turning at the door with a gesture both hopeful and despairing, pale in the twilight, unfinished - Edith Harms in water-colour and pencil - and I, book in hand, saying: « Wunderlich nah ist der Held doch den jugendlich Toten. » as if I had found the key to creation;

and she, her face lit as if by sunbeams, rushed back and kissed me lightly on the cheek, almost as if the Spanish Influenza that had killed her and would kill him three days later was a benediction.

- A DREAM OF EGON SCHIELE -