"You will excuse me," she said in Russian, "but when I heard your conversation I could not restrain myself. You are Russians, aren't you? "

We confirmed it.

"Have you been long in America?" continued Mrs. Feshina. "Two months."

"Where did you come from, then?" "From Moscow." "Directly from Moscow?"

She was astounded.

"You know, this is simply a miracle! I have been living here so many years among these Americans, and suddenly—Russians!"

We saw that she wanted very much to talk, that this was really a great event for her, and so we asked her to call on us at our camp. A few minutes later she drove up alone in her little old automobile. She sat with us a long time, talking without end.

She had left Kazan in 1923. Her husband was the painter Feshin who was quite well known in Russia in his day. He was friendly with Americans from the American Relief Administration, who had been on the Volga, and they arranged for him to be invited to America. He decided to remain here for ever, not to return to the Soviet Union. This was determined in the main by his business success. His pictures sold and he accumulated a lot of money. Being a genuine Russian, Feshin could not live in a large American city, and therefore moved here to Taos. They built themselves a house, a remarkable house. It took them three summers to build, and it cost them about twenty thousand dollars. They built and built, and when the house was finished they parted. They decided that it had been wrong for them to have lived together at all, that they were not at all suited to each other. Feshin left Taos and went to Mexico City. Their daughter is now studying in a Hollywood ballet school. Mrs. Feshina remained alone in Taos. She has no money, she has not even enough to heat her splendid house in the winter. That is why for the winter she rented a little house for three dollars a month in the village of Rio Chiquito, where there are only Mexicans who do not even know English but who are very good people. There is no electricity in Rio Chiquito. She is obliged to earn her own living. She decided to write for the cinema, but so far she has not earned anything. It is a pity to sell the house. It cost twenty thousand, but now during the depression it could not bring more than five thousand.

Our guest spoke eagerly, wanted to have her fill in talking, constantly applied her hands to her nervous face and kept repeating:

"It is strange to speak Russian in Taos, with new people. Tell me, do I make mistakes in Russian?"

She spoke very well, but occasionally she hesitated, trying to remember the necessary word. We said to her:

"Listen, why do you stay here? Why don't you ask for permission to return to the Soviet Union?"

"I would go with pleasure, but where shall I go? They are all new people there. I don'know anybody. It's too late for me to begin a new life."

She made us promise to come and see how she lived at Rio Chiquito, explained to us how to drive there, and disappeared in her lumbering old car.

A strange fate! Where was this Russian woman living? In Rio Chiquito, in the state of New Mexico, in the United States of America, among Indians, Mexicans and Americans.

In the morning we at once departed for the school in the Pueblo village to look for our policeman. There was a fog in Pueblo. In it were dimly outlined grey trees, distant and near-by hills, melancholy Indians in blankets standing as ever on the roofs and looking like the shut-in. inmates of a harem. Dogs ran over their houses, without touching us, ran quickly up the ladders and disappeared in doorways.

The school was large and excellently managed, like all schools in the States. We saw large splendid class-rooms, hardwood floors, shining porcelain washbasins, nickel-plated taps.

The policeman could, not go with us. His duties detained him at the school. Right now he was preoccupied with settling a conflict. One Indian boy had struck another Indian boy on the head. The policeman was calmly reprimanding the guilty one. Around him stood the boys, silent and important, like chieftains at a large conclave. The usual childish hubbub was not there. Everyone listened solemnly to the policeman, lifting now and then their handsome eagle-beak noses or scratching their straight, gleaming black hair. But as soon as the policeman, shuffling away in his slippers, went off, the boys began to jump and run like all the little mischiefs in the world.

The director of the school, a historian by specialty, abandoned the cultured East and came here because he wanted to learn to know the Indians better.

"Very talented children, a very talented people, and of course especially inclined toward art," said the director. "A talented and an enigmatic people. I have lived many years among them, but this people is still incomprehensible to me. Indians are obliged to send their children to school because education is compulsory. Otherwise they would not send a single child. All the instructors are white people, and instruction is in English. For the most part, the children study very well. But suddenly some of the boys in a certain year who pass their tenth or eleventh birthday stop going to school. They do not go for the entire year. That year they get their own native training somewhere, but we have never been able to find out where. And when such a boy again appears in school, he is already a real Indian and he will never again be white in culture. When the children finish school the old men tell them: 'Choose! If you want to be a white man, then go to them and never come back to us. But if you want to remain an Indian, then forget everything that you have been taught.' And almost always the children remain at home. Two or three years after graduation from school, they return occasionally and ask to be allowed to look through old American newspapers, but soon after that they stop coming altogether. These are Indians, the real Indians, without electricity, automobiles, and other nonsense. They live among the whites, full of silent contempt for them. To this day they do not recognize them as masters of their country. And this is not at all surprising when one recalls that in the history of the Indian people there was not even one occasion when one tribe enslaved another. An Indian tribe cannot be enslaved. It can only be exterminated (there were such cases), and only then may one consider that an Indian tribe has been conquered."

We were guided through the village by a fifteen-year-old Indian girl. Suddenly she said:

"Do you know an Indian woman that lives in Chicago? She's my sister."

That was a rare case. Her sister had married a white man, an artist. He was undoubtedly one of the visionaries of Taos, who had come here to inhale the atmosphere of an ancient civilization.

In the middle of the village stood an old Spanish church. The Pueblos are Catholics, but very strange Catholics. For Christmas and Easter they bring down the statue of the Madonna and perform a war dance around her. Then they go away to some praying hole and there pray—but hardly in accordance with Catholic rites.

Looking at the silent and stately redskins, as proud as ancient Romans, we repeated to ourselves, recalling the words of the school director:

"Yes, yes, they are Catholics, and they speak English and they have seen automobiles and the like; but they are nevertheless Indians, real Indians, and above all Indians—and nothing else."

Frightened by the accident on the frozen highway, of which we have already told, the first thing we did in Santa Fe was to buy wonderful gold-coloured chains and drove out in the direction of Albuquerque.