(Photograph by Marceau)

We lay on our hillside which was really a pyramid side, and the sun burnt as I tried to count how many churches there were in the plain, but gave it up as too long a job. Beautiful old toned bells kept ringing around and below us from every direction. One big church would have been ample for the size of the little town, and money and labor better spent on drainage and sanitation. While thus ruminating a cassocked priest came down the winding way, saying his prayers out loud, out of a book. By him walked an attendant who held a linen umbrella over his head to shade him. So absorbed was he in his prayers that he never noticed the Indian man and woman who got up from their seat under the tree and came towards him. He had to stop on his way when they threw themselves down on their knees before him. He blessed them with the sign of the Cross, and they remained kneeling and crossing themselves until he was out of sight and sound.

When we got back to Puebla at 5 o’clock, Dick threw himself on my bed all of a heap. I took his temperature—it was 102—I undressed him and in a few minutes he was in a heavy feverish sleep.

Twice that night he waked me suddenly by loud cries. He screamed in terror. When I put the light on he looked at me with glassy eyes and did not know me. He was momentarily delirious. Never had I any experience of such a thing. I realized in a flash all that my family thought of my bringing Dick to Mexico. I thought of Margaret and of the contrast of her proper environment. I got into a panic and resolved that if it were humanly possible for him to travel, Dick should return to Mexico by the 6:30 train next morning.

At five, when we had to get up, he was tired and weak, but his fever had subsided.

August 3, 1921. Mexico City.

I went to see Mr. Rameo Martinez, the head of the Academia, and asked him kindly to send a plaster moulder to my hotel to cast the little sketch for a possible Russian Monument. I brought it from New York to finish here. I had a perfectly excellent Mexican “boxer” model, broadshouldered and full of muscles, that Mr. Martinez produced for me, thus enabling me to finish it. I also asked him if I could visit his open air school out in the country, at Cherubosco, which he accordingly invited me to do.

Edith Bonilla motored me out there. The students work in a patio. Martinez’ idea is the open air, no false lights. He has talked to me too of his ambition that his students shall be Mexican, not cosmopolitan, nor French in their art. The idea is right. But when one has looked around: what is Mexican Art? There is Toltec, Maya, Aztec art. There is Spanish (colonial) evidenced in architecture. But one looks in vain for evidences of modern Mexican Art. At the school some perfectly mediocre studies were being done by students who, by their years, should have been far beyond what they were doing. There were mature men painting the eternal still life groups of pots and oranges. There was the eternal model, an old woman sitting holding a bowl. Only the model in this instance was brown instead of white. I realized with overwhelming weariness the futility of schools.... I went to a school once. A night school. I was paralysed. I achieved nothing, I was the most unpromising pupil there. Moreover I hated it and dreaded it, and only went out of sheer self-discipline. This is at a time when I had quite a lot of commissions to work at in my own studio. I benefited in no way from the school, and I don’t believe anyone else does. At best it succeeds in turning out a mould, a type, a “school.” Only once in a million times does one arise, who would have arisen anyway, anyhow, anywhere. Mr. Martinez, who has worked in Paris (why?) who has no more “the soul of Mexico,” or the depth to realise it, will work in vain, open air or indoor, unless he instils some spirit into those students! Always these masters point to a student’s work and with pride call it “du Gauguin”; easy enough to make a bad Gauguin. I wonder on whom it reflects most discredit: Gauguin or the student. If only the teacher would say, “My God! All this is awful, let’s have something new....”

There was one sculptor at the Country School. His Christian name was Phidias, not his fault, and no one could have foreseen. He looked white and on the verge of suicide. He said he had been working in Paris ... but that he had done nothing since. He had been back six months. He said there were no sculptors and no art appreciation in Mexico. He certainly could not, even if he would, have worked in the room into which he took me. It would be a perfectly fit room in which to hang oneself. He looked very depressed,—I fear he will starve.

I came back, and went to the reception of the Pani’s. Like last time full of cosmopolitans, diplomats, from South America, such as Uruguay, Guatemala and the like, and also Mr. Malbran and Mr. Summerlin. There were heaps of women and girls, sitting in rows, and men grouped in doorways. That is the only unconventional part of the Pani parties, that the sexes do not engage one another in conversation. Maybe it is the habit of the country.