A Simple Tale by John Galsworthy

Name: A Simple Tale
Author: John Galsworthy

"A Simple Tale" is a short narrative built as a story-within-a-story: the vagabond philosopher Ferrand, a recurring Galsworthy character, recounts to an unnamed English gentleman ("monsieur") an episode from his own days of poverty in London, offering it as his answer to a conversation about anti-Semitism and Christian hypocrisy. Ferrand recalls one autumn when he was lodging, for fourpence a night, in a crowded common lodging-house — a "palace," as he ironically calls it — in Westminster. There he shares a room with an old man, frail, white-bearded, and gentle to the point of saintliness, who earns his bed and broth by sweeping out the lodging-house's filthy passages and tending to its roughest inhabitants: sewing on buttons, cleaning pipes, bathing black eyes, washing the feet of drunkards. He reads only the Bible, speaks softly "as if to a woman," and shows an almost inhuman selflessness and patience with the outcasts around him. Ferrand is charmed by him but notices one incongruity: every night, at exactly the same hour, the old man — frail as he is — goes out alone for a long walk through London and does not return until nearly midnight. Curious, Ferrand resolves to follow him in secret. Over three successive nights, Ferrand shadows the old man through different parts of London — St. James's Park, the grand houses of Eaton Square, the embankment near Chelsea, and finally a quiet street of small old houses near a great church in Westminster. Each night the pattern is the same: the old man, leaning on an unusually tall staff shaped like a shepherd's crook, positions himself near a fine house and waits for its wealthy occupants — a judge or dignitary and his family, a bearded professor and the women of his household, a young newlywed couple — to return home from an evening out. As each group approaches its door, he crosses to intercept them and, in a voice of profound humility, begs not for money but simply to be allowed to rest in their doorway. Each time he is refused, though in different ways: the pompous paterfamilias waves him off with an irritated gesture; the professor's wife flees inside crying her husband's name, and the professor himself curtly orders the old man to "go to the proper place"; the young husband and wife, moved and awkward, offer him money instead — a shilling, then a coin "large as a saucer" — but he repeats only his same request, and, ashamed, they shut the door on him. After each rejection the old man trudges back to the lodging-house bent under some invisible weight, his face marked by a grief and fatigue that seem to exceed mere physical exhaustion, before resuming his usual serene, half-otherworldly manner once inside. Baffled by this apparent contradiction between the old man's selfless daily conduct and his nightly ritual of begging — which strikes Ferrand as oddly egoistic behavior for so unselfish a soul — Ferrand finally approaches him directly after the third rejection, asking if he can help. The old man, seemingly speaking to himself rather than to Ferrand, murmurs that he will never find anyone willing to let him rest in their doorway, and that for his sin he is doomed to wander forever. In this single line, Ferrand grasps the old man's secret: he believes himself to be the Wandering Jew, the legendary figure condemned to roam the earth eternally because he refused Christ rest at his own doorway on the road to Calvary. Every night he re-enacts that ancient refusal in reverse, seeking from strangers the shelter he himself once denied, only to be turned away again and again by the comfortable and respectable people of London — judges, professors, young lovers — none of whom will let a strange old vagrant sleep in their doorway. Ferrand's story ends there: shortly afterward he himself left London on the road, as is his habit, and never learned anything more of the old man's fate. But he draws from the episode a paradoxical moral, delivered to his listener with characteristic mockery of respectable "Christian" society. If the Wandering Jew truly exists and has spent centuries being refused shelter by generation after generation of comfortable Christians, Ferrand argues, then through that very endurance of rejection and his own continuing gentleness and charity toward others he has effectively become Christ-like — more genuinely Christian, in his humility and suffering, than any of the pious churchgoers and pillars of society who turn him away at their doors. Those who deny him lodging while mouthing Christian virtue are, in effect, re-enacting the Jew's original sin against Christ, while the old man, in his patient suffering and unfailing charity to the wretched, embodies Christ's own character. Ferrand closes with the bleak, satirical observation that the world is composed almost entirely of such self-satisfied "Christians" who behave like the legendary Wandering Jew at every door, and that true Christ-like virtue is found instead in the despised wanderer they refuse to shelter. The tale functions as Galsworthy's ironic commentary — voiced through his favorite outsider-philosopher Ferrand — on the gap between professed religious identity and lived compassion, using the old man's delusion (or perhaps insight) as a vehicle to expose the smugness, fear, and hypocrisy of respectable society when confronted with the genuinely poor and strange.

By John Galsworthy · First published 1924 · Genre: Literary Fiction, Philosophical Fiction, Social Commentary · 4,209 words

First lines

Talking of anti-Semitism one of those mornings, Ferrand said: "Yes, _monsieur_, plenty of those gentlemen in these days esteem themselves Christian, but I have only once met a Christian who esteemed himself a Jew. _C'était très drôle -- je vais vous conter cela._

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A Simple Tale is listed on Textopian as a short story by John Galsworthy, dated 1924 CE.

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Work type: Short story
Author: John Galsworthy
Date: 1924 CE
Language: English
Genres: Literary Fiction, Philosophical Fiction, Social Commentary, Allegorical Fiction, Psychological Fiction
Length: 4,209 words
Structure: 1 section, 15 paragraphs
Reading fit: Fairly Easy (7th Grade)

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Genres

Literary Fiction — Sophisticated narrative structure with artistic language, philosophical depth, and complex character portrayal employing Galsworthy's signature style of social observation and psychological insight.
Philosophical Fiction — Central preoccupation with profound questions of suffering, identity, spiritual redemption, and the nature of compassion; explores metaphysical dimensions through the Wandering Jew motif and Christ parallels.
Social Commentary — Sustained critique of class divisions, wealth inequality, and Christian hypocrisy; contrasts the wealthy's material comfort with spiritual poverty against the old man's material deprivation but spiritual depth.
Allegorical Fiction — The old man functions as symbolic representation of suffering humanity, eternal wandering, and redemptive compassion; Ferrand's observation reveals the allegorical layers beneath the literal narrative.