As far as we could gather Norway knows not our heavy half-past one lunch, over which so much profitable business is transacted. When the Norwegian sits down before a table with a menu and a wine list in front of him, his day’s work is finished. If he feels any need for casual sustenance he goes into a café and has a snack.
Christiania has made a speciality of the snack. I suppose that any stranger abroad must wonder who do the work and when they do it. There are never anywhere any signs of industry. The Italian who is taken to the Oval on a weekday would certainly wonder how ten thousand workmen could afford to watch cricket on a Monday. Indeed, I have yet to discover how they can. If they are in work they should be in factories and offices, and if out of work one would assume them to be penniless. There is no Oval in Christiania, but there are, as I said, an honest number of cafés; and the _coldt bord_ is spread in ample welcome. Not quite as amply perhaps as in Finse. But still amply enough to make an Englishman a little ashamed of the hospitality that the Bodega offers to its guests. Great trays of various _hors d’œuvres_, cold meats and cold poached eggs, and cheese sandwiches: sandwiches that are a vast improvement on our own; with the cheese or meat arranged on one and not between two slices of bread, so that you can see what you are buying and cannot be deceived into the purchase of a ham sandwich entirely composed of fat.
Perhaps I am talking too much of the pleasures of the table, but food has a large share in the right ordering of a holiday. A sense of moral indignation is not a characteristic with which we should be inclined to associate the engaging and fantastic personality of Mr Norman Douglas. But he has known such moments; and those of us who consider good food and good wine two of God’s greatest gifts to man, remember gratefully his attitude to the traveller who confessed that he did not mind what he ate; and in truth it was a disarming of revelation. “The man who is indifferent to women,” George Moore makes one of his characters say, “is indifferent to all things,” and so is the man who is indifferent to food and wine. Such a one is incomplete. He lacks a sense. He is an abnormality. And myself I should be equally pained were someone to say to me, “Oh, let’s go anywhere, I don’t mind where I dine.” I should feel as pained, and for that matter as shocked, as if someone who had asked me to lend him a book were to say, “Oh, any old novel, I don’t care!” Far preferable the lady who said to the assistant at Bumpus’s, “I’ve got a green book and a red book, now I should like a blue book.” She had at least a sense of setting, of _décor_. Her drawing-room would have been, I am sure, a very delicate symphony in blue and grey, and the light from the electric lamp would have fallen softly on an exquisite disarray of cushions. Certainly she would never have said, “Oh, let’s go anywhere. I don’t mind where I dine.” She would know that evening is the artist of the day’s traffic, who smooths, and composes and selects, and achieves a harmony out of disorder; that it is for us to co-operate by the choice of the right book, the right companion, and the right setting.