Argosy All-Story Weekly, April 16, 1921 — page 20: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

JASON, SON There stole into the room a girl of Mazzer —a graceful creature, for all the strange blue color of her naked skin. Twin braids of ruddy hair fell from her head to her waist. Her figure held all the untrammeled litheness of a panther as she advanced. Across her outstretched arms she bore a pure white cloth. 3 | Upon it, the child of Jason Croft and Naia of Aphur was placed. She wrapped the fabric about it, cradling it against her firmly budded breasts. She turned to. Naia, smiling, sinking down be- side her on her supple rounded thighs. And then—for one brief instant I saw the light of the Madonna flame in those wonderful eyes—the light with which Naia the mother looked first on Jason’s—son. Croft addressed me. “ Maia,” he said softly. “I’ve described her to you before if you remember, Mur- ray. mitted to attend the—the child.” His voice broke. His face was weary, overstrained, worn. I understood. The graceful girl was Naia’s personal attendant —the Mazzerian woman, who had aided her mistress in saving Croft’s life at a time when he was taken captive during the Maz- zerian war. I nodded my comprehension. He bent again as though by irresistible attraction above the couch where the blue girl still was kneeling, and Naia seemed waiting his undivided attention. Once more I turned my head. It was the holy moment —the hour of realization between man and woman. Through the half-drawn curtains of a window, light stole into the room. It shamed the incandescents in their sconces. A finger of golden glory touched the tips of the upflung wings of Azil. With a start, I realized that the night of anguish was ended—that new life had come into the house of Jason with—the dawn. CHAPTER IIL. BACK TO EARTH. WENT toward the curtains and stood looking out between them, removing so far as I could even my invisible presence from the tableau behind me. She asked that she might be per- OF JASON. 11 The attendants were moving about. I heard the soft pad of their gnuppa-hide sandaled feet, the softened tones of their voices. I heard Naia speaking and Croft’s deeply quivering answer, and once more the wail of the child. “Murray.” Jason was speaking to me. I sensed his touch on my arm. Again he was in astral form. ‘“ Come, while the women perform their task.” My glance shot beyond him to where his physical body was seemingly lost in a leth- argy of exhaustion, once more in the red wood chair. It did more. It fell on Naia. The ray of sunlight had lowered as Sirius had mounted above the eastern horizon. It made her golden tresses seem more than ever an aureole about her face on the pillow —a face grown exquisitely tender, lighted not merely with the sun of morning, but by the inner, the newly ignited glow of mother- hood. I turned from it and followed Croft through the curtained doorway of the cham- ber, onto the balcony, along which one ap- proached the room. He had described it minutely to me, but even so I marveled at it as we stood to- gether, sensing its proportions, its brilliant yet not offensive blendings of yellow and white and red. White was the balcony rail about it, red and yellow the alternating tiles that paved its floors. Red and yellow, too, were the steps of the stairs that mount- ed to the balcony from either end of the court, and red the carven pillars that sup- ported the balcony on a series of arches, between which pure white examples of Pa- losian sculpture showed. Golden were the plates of glass in the roof above us—open mainly now to the air of heaven, that the flowers and plants and shrubs which dotted the unpaved portions of the court beneath us might breathe. _ And then I think I must have started very much as Croft himself had done the first time he beheld such a sight, as I be- came conscious of a man, blue as the blue girl of Mazzer in the room behind me, wearing upon his shaven poll a single flam- ing tuft of red. Naked he was as Adam in all his stalwart manhood, and he bore a skin equipped with a sprinkling-nozzle upon his back while he sprayed the beds of grow- COMmIGHOO SH (C@