The Tragedy of Washington Square

One of our favorite amusements at lunch-time is to walk down to Henry
Rosa's pastry shop, and buy a slab of cinnamon bun. Then we walk round
Washington Square, musing, and gradually walking round and engulfing the
cinnamon bun at the same time. It is surprising what a large
circumference those buns of Henry's have. By the time we have gnashed
our way through one of those warm and mystic phenomena we don't want to
eat again for a month.

The real reason for the cinnamon bun is to fortify us for the
contemplation and onslaught upon a tragic problem that Washington Square
presents to our pondering soul.

Washington Square is a delightful place. There are trees there, and
publishing houses and warm green grass and a fire engine station. There
are children playing about on the broad pavements that criss-cross the
sward; there is a fine roof of blue sky, kept from falling down by the
enormous building at the north side of the Square. But these things
present no problems. To our simple philosophy a tree is a vegetable, a
child is an animal, a building is a mineral and this classification
needs no further scrutiny or analysis. But there is one thing in
Washington Square that embodies an intellectual problem, a grappling of
the soul, a matter for continual anguish and decision.

On the west side of the Square is the Swiss consulate, and, it is this
that weighs upon our brooding spirit. How many times we have paused
before that quiet little house and gazed upon the little red cross, a
Maltese Cross, or a Cross of St. Hieronymus; or whatever the heraldic
term is, that represents and symbolizes the diplomatic and spiritual
presence of the Swiss republic. We have stood there and thought about
William Tell and the Berne Convention and the St. Gothard Tunnel and St.
Bernard dogs and winter sports and alpenstocks and edelweiss and the
Jungfrau and all the other trappings and trappists that make Switzerland
notable. We have mused upon the Swiss military system, which is so
perfect that it has never had to be tested by war; and we have wondered
what is the name of the President of Switzerland and how he keeps it out
of the papers so successfully. One day we lugged an encyclopedia and the
Statesman's Year Book out to the Square with us and sat down on a bench
facing the consulate and read up about the Swiss cabinet and the
national bank of Switzerland and her child labor problems. Accidentally
we discovered the name of the Swiss President, but as he has kept it so
dark we are not going to give away his secret.

Our dilemma is quite simple. Where there is a consulate there must be a
consul, and it seems to us a dreadful thing that inside that building
there lurks a Swiss envoy who does not know that we, here, we who are
walking round the Square with our mouth full of Henry Rosa's bun, once
spent a night in Switzerland. We want him to know that; we think he
ought to know it; we think it is part of his diplomatic duty to know it.
And yet how can we burst in on him and tell him that apparently
irrelevant piece of information?

We have thought of various ways of breaking it to him, or should we say
breaking him to it?

Should we rush in and say the Swiss national debt is $----, or ----
kopecks, and then lead on to other topics such as the comparative
heights of mountain peaks, letting the consul gradually grasp the fact
that we have been in Switzerland? Or should we call him up on the
telephone and make a mysterious appointment with him, when we could
blurt it out brutally?

We are a modest and diffident man, and this little problem, which would
be so trifling to many, presents inscrutable hardships to us.

Another aspect of the matter is this. We think the consul ought to know
that we spent one night in Switzerland once; we think he ought to know
what we were doing that night; but we also think he ought to know just
why it was that we spent only one night in his beautiful country. We
don't want him to think we hurried away because we were annoyed by
anything, or because the national debt was so many rupees or piasters,
or because child labor in Switzerland is----. It is the thought that the
consul and all his staff are in total ignorance of our existence that
galls us. Here we are, walking round and round the Square, bursting with
information and enthusiasm about Swiss republicanism, and the consul
never heard of us. How can we summon up courage enough to tell him the
truth? That is the tragedy of Washington Square.

It was a dark, rainy night when we bicycled into Basel. We hid been
riding all day long, coming down from the dark clefts of the Black
Forest, and we and our knapsack were wet through. We had been bicycling
for six weeks with no more luggage than a rucksack could hold. We never
saw such rain as fell that day we slithered and sloshed on the rugged
slopes that tumble down to the Rhine at Basel. (The annual rainfall in
Switzerland is----.) When we got to the little hotel at Basel we sat in
the dining room with water running off us in trickles, until the head
waiter glared. And so all we saw of Switzerland was the interior of the
tobacconist's where we tried, unsuccessfully, to get some English baccy.
Then he went to bed while our garments were dried. We stayed in bed for
ten hours, reading, fairy tales and smoking and answering modestly
through the transom when any one asked us questions.

The next morning we overhauled our wardrobe. We will not particularize,
but we decided that one change of duds, after six weeks' bicycling, was
not enough of a wardrobe to face the Jungfrau and the national debt and
the child-labor problenm, not to speak of the anonymous President and
the other sights that matter (such as the Matterhorn). Also, our stock
of tobacco had run out, and German or French tobacco we simply cannot
smoke. Even if we could get along on substitute fumigants the issue of
garments was imperative. The nearest place where we could get any
clothes of the kind that we are accustomed to, the kind of clothes that
are familiarly symbolized by three well-known initials, was London. And
the only way we had to get to London was on our bicycle. We thought we
had better get busy. It's a long bike ride from Basel to London. So we
just went as far as the Basel Cathedral, so as not to seem too
unappreciative of all the treasures that Switzerland had been saving for
us for countless centuries; then we got on board our patient steed and
trundled off through Alsace.

That was in August, 1912, and we firmly intended to go back to
Switzerland the next year to have another look at, the rainfall and the
rest of the statistics and status quos. But the opportunity has not
come.

So that is why we wander disconsolately about Washington Square, trying
to make up our mind to unburden our bosom to the Swiss consul and tell
him the worst. But how can one go and interrupt a consul to tell him
that sort of thing? Perhaps he wouldn't understand it at all; he would
misunderstand our pathetic little story and be angry that we took up his
time. He wouldn't think that a shortage of tobacco and clothing was a
sufficient excuse for slighting William Tell and the Jungfrau. He
wouldn't appreciate the frustrated emotion and longing with which we
watch the little red cross at his front door, and think of all it means
to us and all it might have meant.

We took another turn around Washington Square, trying to embolden
ourself enough to go in and tell the consul all this. And then our heart
failed us. We decided to write a piece for the paper about it, and if
the consul ever sees it he will be generous and understand. He will know
why, behind the humble fa�ade of his consulate on Washington Square, we
see the heaven-piercing summits of Switzerland rising like a dream, blue
and silvery and tantalizing.

P.S. Since the above we have definitely decided not to go to call on the
Swiss consul. Suppose he were only a vice-consul, a Philadelphia Swiss,
who had never been to Switzerland in his life!