Publication
The story was published in the Civil and Military Gazette on December 7th 1886, in the first Indian edition of Plain Tales from the Hills in 1888, and in subsequent editions of that collection. See David Alan Richards p. 17, passim.
The story
Phil Garron goes out to India to work on a tea-plantation, leaving Agnes Laiter, who loves him. After a time she is persuaded by her parents to marry another man, and though Phil cares little for her, when he hears of the marriage he writes saying that his heart is broken. Soon, however, he setlles down with Dunmaya, a native girl. Three years later Agnes’s husband dies, and she goes out to offer herself to Phil, but finds him already happily married to Dunmaya. As Norman Page comments in his Kipling Companion [Macmillan 1984] “thus a man ‘who really is not worth thinking of twice’ is loved by two women”.
See also our notes to “Georgie Porgie”, collected in Life’s Handicap (1891).
[J H McG]
©John McGivering 2012 All rights reserved