Published: Civil and Military Gazette, 16 February 1888.

Attribution: In Scrapbook 4 (28/4)

Text: Civil and Military Gazette.

Notes: Like ‘Mr. Anthony Dawking’, probably suggested by RK's travels through India in January and February, 1888. Reprinted in ‘Turnovers’, i, 1888; in the Martindell–Ballard pamphlets; and in Harbord, iv, 1970–2.

An unkindly fate has cursed me with a Curse. It is ordained that wherever my unfortunate feet tread, there has been found a man with Something on his Mind. Like the Ancient Mariner he is unhappy until he can catch a Wedding Guest to whom to tell his tale. I am that Wedding Guest. I am sick of it. I am a repository of confidences and begin to suffer from indigestion. I will unload and scare off the Ancient Mariners.

Observe! I am, on the authority of Tipsley, the only living soul – Tipsley has no regard for dead souls – who knows that Tipsley is a married man. I am sorry for Mrs. Tipsley because Tipsley is always drunk. He caught me alone and undefended in an Intermediate Compartment near Rupaheli, and he wept when I offered him a cheroot. He was a platelayer, but what he felt most was his marriedness. “As true as I'm a-settin’ here,” gulped Tipsley, “I'm a married man. An’ you're the only soul as knows it. Lord! Lord! How strange it all do seem. A Married man!” I had known Tipsley exactly one hour and forty minutes and it seemed very strange indeed. But I wasn't interested in his matrimonial ventures. He might have kept a harem for aught I cared. He told me that he had “never loved but one woman and her he didn't marry.”

Then he cried anew. I'm sure I don't care; every man only loves one woman and generally marries the other. All the Punjab is at perfect liberty to know that Tipsley the platelayer – he is out of employment now, but he thinks he will get work soon – is a married man – married to the wrong woman. She drinks like a “sanguinary ganger.” I don't know what a “ganger” is, but it must be something very like Tipsley. If you meet an “orful fat woman with a bonneck that I paid for on ‘er head, drinking like a sanguinary ganger” you will know that she is Mrs. Tipsley.