“But you don’t tell me,” cried Perry impatiently. “What did you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes, you do: tell me.”
“I can’t recollect, and I never could. I only know I turned very hot and saw sparks, and that there was a regular banging about, and sometimes I was up and sometimes I was down; and then all at once I was standing there, with Mariniaz lying on the ground crying, and with his nose bleeding. Another chap was sitting holding his handkerchief to one eye, and two more were being held up by some of the players, who were giving one of them some water to drink, while the other was showing them a tooth which he held in his fingers.”
“Then you’d whacked four of them?” cried Perry excitedly.
“I don’t know,” said Cyril, with his face screwed up. “I suppose I had been knocking them about a bit, and they wouldn’t fight any more. They all said I was an English savage, and that I ought to be sent out of the place; and then I began to get a bit cooler, and felt sorry I had knocked them all about so much.”
“I don’t see why you should,” cried Perry.
“But I did. It made such an upset. There was no end of a bother. My mother cried about it when I went home, and said I should never look myself again; and when my father came home and saw me with bits of sticking plaster all over my face and knuckles, he was in a regular passion, for he had been hearing about it in the town, and had words with the other boys’ fathers. Then he made me tell him all about it from the beginning, sitting back, looking as fierce and stern as could be, till I had done; and I finished off by saying, ‘What would you have done if you had been me?’
“‘Just the same as you did, Cil, my boy,’ he cried, shaking hands; and then my mother looked astonished, and he sat back in his chair and laughed till he cried. ‘Why, mother,’ he said, ‘they tell us that the English stock is falling off. Not very much, eh? One English to four Spanish.’
“‘But it’s so terrible,’ my mother said. ‘Yes,’ said my father, ‘fighting is very disgraceful. No more of it, Cil, my lad; but I’ve made a mistake: I ought to have made a soldier of you, after all.’ I say, though, Perry, I do wish I were going with you, all the same.”