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For the next few weeks Stefan came and went fitfully, announcing at one point that Miss Berber had ceased to pose for his fantastic study of her, called "The Nixie," but had consented to sit for a portrait. "She's slippery comes and goes, keeps me waiting interminably," he complained. "I can never be sure of her, but she's a wonderful model."
Gathering her short, green skirt about her, for she wore, as on that February day in her father's laboratory, what he called the "nixie green", the sylvan Camp Fire uniform, the inventor's daughter stretched herself breast downward, upon the flat ledge of the Pinnacle's crest.
An expensive and inconclusive flirtation at the cost of his wife's happiness, a few disturbing memories, and two unfinished pictures. Out of patience with himself, he plunged into his work. In two weeks of concentrated effort he had finished the Nixie, and had arranged with Constantine to exhibit it and the Demeter immediately.
In the growing volume sounds a clear, almost martial call of the brass. And the strain roves on generous path and rises out of all its gloom to a burst of profound cheer. As in all fairy tales, the scene quickly vanishes. On dancing rays and ripples is the laughing nixie; but suddenly breaks the first song of the main figures.
"You shall live for a long time in little places where you will weary of yourself. You will learn to know yourself so well that everything you want will seem too good for you, and you will cease to claim it. And so, in time, you shall get free." Then the Nixie had to rise up and go away, and be shut into the fastness of a very small space, according to the words of the Queen.
He achieved the sale more readily because of the newspaper controversy aroused by the Nixie. Was this picture a satire on life, or on the celebrated Miss Berber? Was it great art, or merely melodrama? Were Byrd's effects of river-light obtained in the old impressionist manner, or by a subtler method of his own? Was he a master or a poseur?
Thackeray's world is passing; the children he knew, the boys he tipped and took to the play, are middle- aged men fogies, in fact. Tempus edax rerum, Time has an appetite as good as that of a boy at his first club dinner. The meaning of the great writer's contemporary allusions may be lost, like those of Villon and Aristophanes. Such is the fate of comedy. Was it a nixie?
"I'm glad," said Nixie, expressing the verdict of the nursery. "I thought she was awfully stupid." "She wasn't a real lake at all," declared another, "she was only a sort of puddle." Jimbo, however, said little, and the Colonel likewise held his peace. But the governess, whether she was a lake or only a puddle, left her mark behind her. The Empty House was no longer harmless.
A climactic phrase of trumpets ends with a burst of all the chorus on stirring harmony, where in diminishing strokes of bells long rings the melodic note. The teasing motive of the nixie returns while the trumpet sounds a shadowy echo of its phrase, again to dying peal of bells. A chorus of eerie voices sing the mocking air, and again sounds the refrain of trumpet as in rebuke.
Snegourka had disappeared from this life as mysteriously as she had come into it. Adapted by the author. The river was so clear because it was the home of a very beautiful Water Nixie who lived in it, and who sometimes could emerge from her home and sit in woman's form upon the bank.
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