A noble foundation, that breakfast, for a long day in the open; and when evening came one was glad to sit and talk quietly; one’s brain fresh and one’s body tired. It is no part of my intention here--and I half hope that it never will be--to draw pictures of my friends. Enough to say that the evenings passed very happily in such casual intermittent talk as can only be exchanged between two friends who know each other so well as to have left scarcely a secret from one another.
It is an eight-hour journey from Finse to Christiania. But eight-hour journeys abroad seem of no more matter than a week-end run to Brighton. We are frightened in London of any place that we cannot find on a tube map. I have never once been to watch a county match at Leyton. “Heavens,” I say, “but that’s miles away. I could not think of going there.” It never even occurred to me three years ago to watch the third day of the Middlesex and Yorkshire match at Bradford, although the championship was at stake there. And yet it would not have been, I expect, such a terribly fatiguing affair. I could have probably caught a train at about ten o’clock. I should have read a couple of novels for review, lunched on the way, and arrived at the ground shortly after two. I should have seen the finish of the match. By six o’clock I should have been in the train, reviewing one novel before dinner, the other after; and arriving at home certainly before midnight.
I remember being considerably surprised last summer when an officer on leave from India told me that he was going to spend a week in Blackpool to see the D’Oyly Carte Company in the Gilbert and Sullivan Operas. “Lord,” I said, “what, all the way up there?” “It doesn’t seem very far,” he answered, “when you’ve come all the way from Poona.” Certainly we did not feel that we were undertaking a great enterprise when we left behind us the mountains and the snow of Finse.
It is a good city, Christiania, clean and fresh and compact, with broad streets, and an honest sprinkling of restaurants and cafés: a good city, shall we say, to spend four days in.
After four days one begins to weary of shop windows, and museums, and public buildings, and a drifting in and out of cafés. But for four days it was very pleasant to watch the stir of life in a foreign capital. Very different from ours, it would seem, the framework of their routine: their mealtimes, for example. You will find a notice outside the principal restaurants: Breakfast, 11-2; dinner, 2-6; supper, 8-11. Between the hours of six and eight, that is to say, you cannot get a solid meal, and the big meal of the day is taken at about half-past three. The restaurants were quite empty at two o’clock when we used to begin our lunch.