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.
That is why the choice of the right restaurant is so important. If we are in the mood for conversation there is our club or the Café Royal; if we are alone and it would amuse us to watch other people dance, or should we wish to add as a flavouring to the music and the dancing the note ever so slightly struck of fugitive romances, there is the balcony of the Elysée Café. Perhaps we feel sentimental, and at a certain table in a certain restaurant, to the accompaniment of “Tango Dream” or of some other tune of yesteryear that we have specially asked the orchestra to play, we recall a phase of life that is concluded, and quote with appropriate melancholy, Ah me, ah me, with what another heart ...! And there are again times when we ask simply for a quiet meal in our own company.
It may have been good fortune, or it may have been through trained instinct, that we discovered on our first day in Christiania the Theatre Café: the restaurant was on the first floor, and there was a band on the balcony above the café on the floor below; so that the music rose softly and mysteriously through the floor, making it easy for us to weave stories round the various couples of the other tables.
That middle-aged man and the young girl at the table by the window, were they father and daughter; or were we attending the first scene, the prelude, of some grey seduction? That young couple two tables from us, they were not noticing what they ate. They hardly spoke a word to one another; but their eyes kept meeting: and as they met, they smiled. She was not wearing an engagement ring and we wondered whether he would propose to her that afternoon, or whether he had already proposed to her as they had driven there that morning in a taxi. Were they sitting now shy and happy in the memory of their first kisses? We wondered if they would make a success of life together. They were very young, we thought. Would she still be pretty in ten years’ time? Would that fragile charm of hers survive in womanhood? And we decided that it depended largely on the life that awaited her, that hers was not a prettiness to sustain long hours of toil and housework; and we hoped in that atmosphere of unseen music that fortune would be kind to her, that her man would invest their money wisely and present her with a large house and many servants.
We went a couple of times, on the invitation of the management, to the National Theatre, once to a modern piece—a Galsworthy sort of play—the other time to a costume drama—Madame Legros, by Heinrich Mann. We were not, either of us, I think, able to follow the plots at all closely; but as a compensation we were able to study more carefully those little mannerisms of dress and acting that are obscured by the quick action of the play; that the Norwegian dandy, for example, does not hitch up his trousers on sitting down. And we were able to concentrate our attention, more than we should otherwise, on the stage effects, the lighting, the technique, the carpentry of the business.
But it was, I think, as a picture that the theatre there appealed chiefly to us. The theatre in a small town tends to become, as it can never hope to become in London, a social and intellectual centre. One seemed there to be in touch with the life of Christiania. And it was pleasant to stroll between the acts down the long promenade behind the stalls, to watch the various groups greet and mingle and separate; to walk up the wide-columned staircase and turn into the large reception-rooms, with their gilt chairs and the inevitable bar for snacks; the gruyère and ham sandwiches, and the Hansa Ol; and it was pleasant to walk out into the cool air of the balcony and look out over the city as it lay below us in light and shadow. In the immediate foreground the stern statues of Ibsen and Björnson; the trees, the gardens and the bandstand; beyond, the turreted house of parliament; and on either side running parallel the bright thoroughfares of the Carl Johansgate and the Storthingsgarten with their trams and restaurants and throng of people.
A pretty picture, but one that might at such an hour wake sadly in the heart of the young Norwegian a sense of life hasting from him. His whole life would seem to be enclosed by the bright boundaries of those streets, going no farther than the eye could see. A nation, he would say, of three million people, a capital of two streets and a few restaurants, and he would think regretfully of the scope and freedom of other countries and other cities—London, America, New York.
A story might be well began there on the balcony of the National Theatre in Christiania, with a young man confronted suddenly by the challenge of his life’s tether; a young man dreaming of a world wider and more glamorous than his own, a world that would hold fit employment for his youth and courage and ambition. He would turn from the balcony with an ache about him, and it might be that in the wide reception-room behind it he would find himself suddenly beside the girl whose image had been never long absent from his thoughts, and there would be comfort for him in the sight of her cool skin and light flaxen hair and pale cornflower blue eyes, eyes that would smile softly into his, that would seem to bid him “take life easy as the grass grows on the weirs.” And her sweetness would be cast as a net about him, entangling alike his dreams and purpose and his discontent. They will say nothing: there will be no need of words; but they will turn and walk out of the large room and stand together alone and silent on the balcony, in the evening air, happy, unutterably happy in their nearness one beside the other.
And he will never leave the city: he will be unfaithful to his dream; he will build a chalet on the hills of Majorstuen. And his youth will pass; and one evening he will stand again alone upon the balcony, and remember how thirty years earlier he had stood there, dreaming of a wider city, and the old ache will rise in him and he will wonder if he has been wise to accept the immediate adventure, the adventure that lay to hand. He will ask himself whether he might not have found elsewhere employment for that faith and energy of which the years have robbed him.