But apart from the small boys on the bridges, the present system is most unsatisfactory for people who know “a man in the boat.”  Even in a football match it is possible for an aunt occasionally to distinguish her nephew and say, “Look, there is Edward.”  But if she says, “Look, there is Edward,” meaning No. 5 in the Cambridge boat, you know she is imagining.  All she sees is a vague splashing between two bowler-hats, or possibly the Oxford rudder moving at high speed through a horse’s legs.  If the race were rowed against the tide we should all get our money’s worth; and the oars-men could then put more realism into their “After-the-Finish” attitudes.  As it is, they roll about in the boat with a praiseworthy suggestion of fatigue, but nobody really believes they are tired—­nobody at least who has rowed on the Thames with the tide.

No, I am afraid the actual race is a sad hypocrisy.  But the training must be terrible.  Think of it.  They started practising in the second week in January:  they row the race in the fourth week in March.  For ten weeks and more they have been “getting those hands away” and driving with those legs and not washing-out.  For ten weeks horrible men with huge calves have shouted at them and cursed them and told them their sins, like a monk telling his beads—­“Bow, you’re late; Two, you’re early; Three, you’re bucketing; Four, you’re not bucketing enough.”  I listen painfully, hoping against hope that at least one of the crew may be left out of the catalogue, that Stroke at least may be rowing properly.  But no, Stroke is not forgotten, and even Cox doesn’t always give complete satisfaction.

Sometimes I feel that I ought to row out in my little boat and offer to tow the incompetents back to Putney.  Yet they seem somehow to travel very easily and well.  But, however harmoniously they swing past “The Doves” or quicken to thirty-five at Chiswick Eyot, I know that in their hearts they are hating each other.  Goodness, how they must hate each other!  For ten weeks they have been rowing together in the same boring boat, behind the same boring back.  I read with grim interest about the periodical shiftings of the crew, how Stroke has moved to the Bow thwart, and Bow has replaced Number Three, and Number Three has shifted to the Stroke position.  They may pretend that all this is a scientific matter of adjustment, of balance and weight and so forth.  I know better.  I know that Stroke is fed up with the face of Cox, and that the mole on Number Two’s neck has got thoroughly on Bow’s nerves, and that if Number Three has to sit any longer behind Number Four’s expanse of back he will go mad.  That is the secret of it all.  But I suppose they each of them hate the coach, and that keeps them together.

Of all these sufferers perhaps Cox is most to be pitied.  They all have to eat what they’re told, no doubt, yards and yards of beefsteak, and so on.  In the old days rowing men had to drink beer at breakfast; I can’t think of anything worse, except, perhaps, stout.  But Cox doesn’t eat anything at all.  He has to get thinner and thinner.  And if there is one thing worse, than eating beefsteak at breakfast it must be watching eight rowing men eating beefsteak at breakfast and not eating anything yourself.