G K Chesterton

The Man Who Was Thursday G K Chesterton

THE suburb of Saffron Park lay on the sunset side of London, as red and ragged as a cloud ofsunset. It was built of a bright brick throughout; its sky-line was fantastic, and even its ground planwas wild. It had been the outburst of a speculative builder, faintly tinged with art, who called itsarchitecture sometimes Elizabethan and sometimes Queen Anne, apparently under the impressionthat the two sovereigns were identical. It was described with some justice as an artistic colony, though it never in any definable way produced any art. But although its pretensions to be anintellectual centre were a little vague, its pretensions to be a pleasant place were quite indisputable. The stranger who looked for the first time at the quaint red houses could only think how very oddlyshaped the people must be who could fit in to them. Nor when he met the people was hedisappointed in this respect. The place was not only pleasant, but perfect, if once he could regard itnot as a deception but rather as a dream. Even if the people were not "artists," the whole wasnevertheless artistic. That young man with the long, auburn hair and the impudent face-that youngman was not really a poet; but surely he was a poem. That old gentleman with the wild, white beardand the wild, white hat-that venerable humbug was not really a philosopher; but at least he was thecause of philosophy in others. That scientific gentleman with the bald, egg-like head and the bare, bird-like neck had no real right to the airs of science that he assumed. He had not discoveredanything new in biology; but what biological creature could he have discovered more singular thanhimself? Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considerednot so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who steppedinto its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comed