Intolerance - Conrad's and others'

Joseph Conrad's Amy Forster, the next story in the RG Davis 10 Modern Masters collection, makes a great match-up w/ the previous story, The New Villa - both stories about how a community rebuffs and rejects an outsider - but in Chekhov's story the outsider is the wealthy engineer who builds a villa outside of the small village and is resented by the serfs and peasants for his wealth and his condescension. Amy Forster is stranger - in this story, which a loquacious and introspective country doctor tells to the narrator (who is really just a pane of glass whom we see through to perceive the story itself), a young man en route from an undefined central European country to America gets shipwrecked near the coast of England and, the only survivor apparently, makes it safely to shore. As he wanders around the village seeking food and shelter, he is taunted and rebuffed by all of the inhabitants - w/ the exception of the eponymous Amy, who offers him some food. In a few days they recognize that he is not a direct threat to anyone, but - because they can't understand his language - they consider him a "lunatic" and put him up to working on jobs for one of the landowners. Over time, he learns English and shows that he's a good workers and a good man - and he marries Amy. They have a child, and the man - now called Yanko (I think), a variant on Little John - tries to teach the baby some of his native language and customs. Amy becomes afraid and turns against her husband, and he dies eventually of pneumonia - and she won't even offer him a glass of water. A strange story of xenophobia - a story that looked as if it would be in classic English "comic" mode - an man over time incorporated into society - but which becomes much darker and sinister. Why is he so repugnant to the villagers, why are they so fiercely intolerant, and why did his wife - whom Conrad portrays as of limited intelligence - turn against her husband? The doctor, who essentially narrates the story, is totally contemptuous of the woman - and by extension then of all the people whom he faithfully serves. This is a rare Conrad story that is only incidentally about the sea - although is account of the young man's journey to the coast by train and his confinement to the hold during the extremely unsafe and uncomfortable passage is very powerful - and very different from the celebration of maritime life for which C is so well known. The story also shows the unfortunate ignorance and intolerance of Conrad himself, at times, in some nasty offhand comments indicating that it was Jews who profited by unscrupulous sales of passage to America to unsuspecting and naive young Eastern Europeans (Conrad's great work is often marred by this casual intolerance, most often toward blacks and native Islanders).