"What!" he roared in Legion French, to the fat German boy who understood not a word of the tirade. "What? Nom d'un pétard! Sacré Dieu! The tunic will not easily button? Then contract thy vile body until it will, thou offspring of a diseased pig and a dead dog. I will fit thee to that tunic, and none other, within the week. Wait! But wait--till thou has eaten the Breakfast of the Legion once or twice, fat sow...."
A gloomy, sardonic Legionary placed a képi upon the crisply curling hair of Reginald Rupert. It was miles too big--a ludicrous extinguisher. The Englishman removed it, and returned it with the remark, "Ça ne marche pas, mon ami."
"Merde!" ejaculated the liverish-looking soldier, and called Heaven to witness that he was not to blame if the son of a beetle had a walnut for a head.
Throwing the képi back into the big box he fished out another, banged it on Rupert's head, and was about to bring his open hand down on the top of it, when he caught the cold but blazing eye of the recruit, and noticed the clenched fist and lips. Had the Legionary's right hand descended, the recruit's left hand would have risen with promptitude and force.
"If that is too big, let the sun boil thy brains and bloat thy skull till it fits, and if it be too small, sleep in it," he remarked sourly, and added that thrice-accursed "blues" were creatures of the kind that ate their young, encumbered the earth, polluted the air, loved to faire Suisse,[#] and troubled Soldiers of the Legion who might otherwise have been in the Canteen, or at Carmelita's--instead of being the valets of sons of frogs, nameless excrescences....
[#] To drink alone; to sulk.
"Too small," replied Rupert coolly, and flung the cap into the box. "Valet? I should condole with a crocodile that had a clumsy and ignorant yokel like you for a valet," he added, in slow and careful French as he tried on a third cap, which he found more to his liking.
The old Legionary gasped.
"Il m'enmerde!" he murmured, and wiped his brow. He, Jules Duplessis, Soldat 1ère Classe, with four years' service and the medaille militaire, had been outfaced, browbeaten, insulted by a miserable "blue." What were the World and La Légion coming to? "Merde!"
While trying on his tunic, Rupert saw one of the Russians hand to the other the tunic and trousers which he had tried on. Apparently being as alike as two pins in every respect they had adopted the labour-saving device of one "fitting on" for both.