He was the superior: he was a big bird and the bishop was a beetle. He was the head master; his lordship of the see of Spilsborough was a new boy. The bishop felt small, terrified, amazed, humiliated.
"Are we going a hundred miles an hour?" asked the bishop.
"Rot!" said Bob, "we're only doing about thirty."
They scorched through quiet Crowland.
"Please put me down," implored the humble bishop.
"I can't stop," said Bob. "I'm afraid he's getting ahead. Sit tight, bishop, I'm going faster now."
"You mustn't, you can't," said the bishop.
Bob stooped for an answer and turned on the fourth speed. The bishop felt the machine sailing underneath him. He fell back and lost all ordinary consciousness.
"It is true," said his mind deep inside him; "it is true that all things are illusion! I have sometimes suspected it. We are a mode of motion; we are affections of the ether. I believe Professor Osborne Reynolds is right. I am a kind of vortex spinning in piled grains of ether. Bob is a vortex. We are in a vortex. We are straws in ether; we are shadows. I have a real non-existent pain in my real imaginary non-existent stomach. I am not alive and I am not dead. I am brave; I am a coward; I am a bishop. This is very wonderful. I shall preach about it when I return to earth. Is that a hedge? Did I see a cow?—a strange, elongated, horned, lowing, permanent, impermanent possibility of sensation and milk in a field made of matter, which is energy, which is an illusion. I become calm; motion is relative. I almost enjoy it. I become a Hegelian. I see that being equals non-being; that pain becomes pleasure if you only have enough of it. I no longer pity those who suffer sufficiently. There is apparently too little pain in the universe. Torquemada did his best to remedy it. Oh, was that a dog? I quite enjoy myself. I wonder if he can go faster. If he can, I wish he would. We are going slow, too slow!"
And, as Geordie's dust showed up much nearer, Bob put his car again at the third speed, and the bishop gasped.