CHAPTER VII
THE DECANTERBURY PILGRIMS
Through a dreary waste of devastated country a little group of refugees plodded in silence. All about them lay fields and orchards which had been torn and uprooted as though by some unbelievable whirlwind. At a watering trough along the road they halted, facing the sign:
COMPULSORY DRINKING STATION
Adults, 1 quart
Children, 1 pint
THIRST FORBIDDEN BETWEEN HERE AND THE NEXT STATION
Under the eye of an armed chuff, who watched them suspiciously, the wretched wanderers drank the water in silence, but without enthusiasm. Then they shuffled on down the road.
At the front of the small procession a slender girl, in a much-stained sports suit, rode on a tall black horse. Beside the horse trudged a bulky man in a grotesque garb of dirty lavender quilting. A matted whisk of coarse beard drooped from his chin, but his blue eyes burned brightly in his sunburnt face. Over his shoulder he carried a six foot length of brass railing, a small folding table, and a shabby knapsack.
Behind the horse limped a lean, dyspeptic-colored individual in a Palm Beach suit that would have been a social death-warrant on the shining sands of its name-place. There is no form of sartorialism that takes on such utter humility as a Palm Beach suit gone wrong. This particular vestment was spotted with ink, with mud, with fruit-juices, with every kind of stain; it was punctured with perforations that might have been due to fallen tobacco tinder. The individual within this travesty of clothing was painfully propelling a wheelbarrow, in which rode (not without complaint) a substantial woman and a baby. An older child trailed from the Palm Beach coat-tail.
These jovial vagabonds, as the reader will have suspected, were no other than Theodolinda Chuff, Virgil Quimbleton, and the family of Bleaks.
Affairs had gone steadily from bad to worse. After the incident—or, as some blasphemously called it, the miracle—at Cana, Bishop Chuff had commenced ruthless warfare. Enraged beyond control by the perfidy of his daughter, he had sent out the armies of the Pan-Antis to wreak vengeance on every human enterprise that could be suspected of complicity in the matter of fermentation. Not only had the countryside been laid waste, but the printing press had been abolished and all publishing trades were now a thing of the past. This, of course, had thrown Dunraven Bleak out of a job. He had retrieved his wife and children from the seashore, and in company with Quimbleton and Miss Chuff, and the noble and faithful horse John Barleycorn, they had led a nomad existence for weeks, flying from bands of pursuing chuffs, and bravely preaching their illicit gospel of good cheer in the face of terrible dangers.