Faith

May, 1932
THE children in Peking are wearing frogs to-day — green frogs on red cloth, red frogs on green cloth, embroidered frogs, stitched frogs, padded and painted frogs, but always a frog on a scrap of cloth and fastened to the child somewhere. On some the frog perches jauntily on the shoulder, on some it hangs from the buttonhole. On others it decorates the chest or sleeve, or in very young babies it covers the top of the spinal column, that place which can so easily split open and let the soul out.

Two children were standing by the side of the road.

‘What are these pretty things you are wearing?’ I asked.

The girl looked at me stolidly, but the little boy said shyly, ‘They are frogs’; and then, seeing my interest, he looked shyer still and said, ‘Mine has bead eyes, and sister’s are only red thread.’ I looked and it was even so.

A girl with piquant pointed features was standing in the great doorway of a residence. Her frog was elaborate.

‘How pretty,’ I said. ‘Where did you buy it?’

‘I did not buy it. My father made it. He painted it.’

‘ And why do you wear it? ’

She had started to answer when an older child standing by, a boy, interrupted and answered in the manner he had heard his elders use in disposing of troublesome questions: ‘It’s only for amusement.’ And the girl echoed, ‘It’s for amusement.’

‘For amusement?’ I said. ‘I don’t think so. There’s a meaning, I am sure.’

But as I walked away they called after me. Their sophistication was not strong enough to withstand their love of telling a tale, of making a sensation, and perhaps they decided to trust me. ‘It’s a belief,’ they said. ‘It’s a sign,’ they chanted in chorus, and, vying with each other, they told their tale: —

‘There’s a rickshaw coolie.’

‘ And an old woman.’

‘ She takes children.’

‘But if we wear this, she can’t get us.’ And, seeing that their fund of information was exhausted, we exchanged good-byes in English which completely restored to them their sense of sophistication.

There were still more children wearing the sign, and yet we were sure we had never seen it before, so we asked the rickshaw coolie if he had an explanation.

‘It’s this way,’ he said. ‘I don’t know whether it is true or not. I did n’t see it myself, but it happened last week and all are talking about it.’ Then the tale which he told was as follows.

A rickshaw coolie was pulling an old lady, and as he pulled she became so heavy he could not pull her farther.

‘Old mother,’ he said, ‘why are you so heavy?’

‘I am not so heavy — it is the children who are heavy.’

‘ The children! What children ? ’

‘The children with me whom I am collecting for the genius of the mountain. He has sent me to get five hundred girls and five hundred boys.’

‘Ai ya,’ said the rickshaw coolie, ‘I have two children! Do not take them!’

‘Then I will not.’

‘But how will you know them?’

‘Fasten a frog on their clothes,’ said the old woman, ‘ and I will not take them.’

And he did so, and all the children in the city did so too. And my rickshaw coolie added a statement pertinent to himself.

‘When he looked around she was gone, but there was a dollar under the cushion of the rickshaw.’

‘And when was this?’ I said. ‘Does it happen every year?’

‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘It was only a few days ago — sometime last week. Everybody is talking of the matter.’

Surely everyone was talking of it, and children miles apart were wearing the frogs. In a far-distant section, by an old temple, a peddler was selling candy to a small child. The frog was on the child’s shoulder.

‘What is it?’ I said to the peddler.

‘It’s a superstition,’ he said. But before we had gone further with the conversation the child’s father came and lifted the child into his arms.

‘There is so much trouble around. The children’s necks swell. This is to keep the evil away.’

And I thought of the isolation wards of a great hospital near by filled with children whose bed cards bore the dread words ‘scarlet fever’ and ‘diphtheria.’ And I thought of the blood upon the lintel, once upon a time, in another Eastern country. And I thought of the old woman who once walked the soil of this land, and who now in the world beyond stirs the pot of forgetfulness for the comfort of new arrivals there, and whose cheerful wrinkled face we see in many a Taoist temple. And I thought of the other old woman who brings the babies from the gracious goddess to the expectant mothers. And I wondered where this new story had started, and how.

IDA PRUITT