He was not likely
to be reluctant if any one could convince him that his duty was to let
sleeping dogs lie.
On the other hand, Cyrus Pym belonged to a country in which things are
possible that seem crazy to the English. Regulations and authorities exactly
like one of Innocent's pranks or one of Michael's satires really exist,
propped by placid policemen and imposed on bustling business men.
Pym knew whole States which are vast and yet secret and fanciful;
each is as big as a nation yet as private as a lost village, and as
unexpected as an apple-pie bed. States where no man may have a cigarette,
States where any man may have ten wives, very strict prohibition States,
very lax divorce States--all these large local vagaries had prepared
Cyrus Pym's mind for small local vagaries in a smaller country.
Infinitely more remote from England than any Russian or Italian,
utterly incapable of even conceiving what English conventions are,
he could not see the social impossibility of the Court of Beacon. It is
firmly believed by those who shared the experiment, that to the very
end Pym believed in that phantasmal court and supposed it to be
some Britannic institution.
Towards the synod thus somewhat at a standstill there approached
through the growing haze and gloaming a short dark figure with a walk
apparently founded on the imperfect repression of a negro breakdown.
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