Antek Boryna’s departure to seek work is a sudden break with the life that has confined him in Lipce: rather than remain among people whose pity and glances deepen his humiliation, he sets out into the winter in search of another place and another existence. The decision brings no clean freedom. Poverty remains at home, his attachment to Jagna follows him onto the road, and the first hours away end in anger and flight from Jankiel’s inn.

The decision to leave

Antek’s plan emerges from a household already strained by want. Hanka protests that they have been reduced to the condition of the poorest hired hands, with neither milk nor comfort, despite all her labor. She is especially wounded that he has sold the last cow her father gave her. Antek answers her distress harshly, telling her that she can use the money to settle what is owed, buy what they need, and put the remainder away. He keeps five rouble notes in his wallet and explains that he cannot set out with only a staff.

When Hanka asks where he is going, Antek says he is leaving to look for work and will not stay there to rot. At first he declares that he will not work for the peasants in Lipce. He then gives a more practical possibility: he will try at the manors, ask about service, and, if necessary, take work as a hired hand from Yuletide. His destination is uncertain, but his refusal to remain is not. He speaks of the wrongs he has to see before his eyes and of being treated with pity and looked at as though he were a mangy dog.

The exchange exposes the distance between the spouses’ immediate fears. Hanka asks whether she is to be left alone, while Antek treats her plea for tenderness as beside the point. She freezes at the intensity of his resolve, which is unlike anything she has known from him. He offers only a brief assurance that he will return in a few days; the promise gives the departure a provisional shape, but does not soften its abruptness.

Out into the snow

Antek leaves without comforting Hanka. As he walks briskly with his staff, the snow crunches beneath his feet; behind him, Hanka stands outside the cottage convulsed with weeping, and Weronka watches from the window. Antek dismisses the crying and looks across the frozen whiteness. Yet the narrative makes clear that his departure is not simply the execution of a settled plan. Even an hour earlier, he had not thought of going. The longing for other villages, new people, and another life has risen unexpectedly, with the force of a flood carrying away a frail shrub.

His wish to escape is sharpened by the prospect of defeat at home. The Parish Priest of Lipce has made clear that Antek would not win in court against Boryna and might lose still more money. Antek therefore postpones vengeance until a more favorable time; he does not forgive the wrongs done to him. For the moment, distance itself is the object. He imagines going wherever the road leads, so long as it takes him far from Lipce, and thinks of flying like a bird over forests and boundless lands.

At a turn near the poplar road, he pauses, chilled and shivering, then chooses the route through the village and behind the mill. Before he has gone far, a sleigh approaches at speed, its runners cutting through the snow and its bells ringing. Boryna is driving, urging on the horses, with Jagusia beside him. Jagna breaks off her talk when she sees Antek. Their eyes meet for a brief instant before the sleigh carries her away.

Jagna on the road

The encounter interrupts Antek’s effort to turn away from the past. The sleigh vanishes through the snow, but he remains motionless, watching it recede. The glimpse of Jagusia’s red skirts and the diminishing bells linger in the scene; the image of Jagna’s blue eyes becomes more vivid to him than the wintry landscape around them. Her expression appears to hold surprise and sorrow alongside joy, leaving the look between them unsettled rather than resolved.

Antek continues on with his head lowered, turning repeatedly to look back, though the road beneath the poplars has emptied. The cold that had already made him shiver now becomes an image for his inward state: his soul seems dimmed and frozen, while the memory of Jagna’s eyes remains bright. He has chosen to leave the place where their history is visible everywhere, but the chance sight of her shows that leaving Lipce does not immediately free him from that attachment.

At Jankiel’s inn

Antek stops at Jankiel’s inn, where the day is quiet apart from occasional customers and voices that bring Jankiel hurrying over. Frost has settled outside, the sleigh runners creak across the snow, and a chill enters the inn. Antek sits drinking slowly, absorbed and apparently unaware of his surroundings. The scene suspends his movement away from Lipce: though he has set out for work, he is not yet shown reaching a manor or finding employment.

He drinks one quart, then a second, while Jagna’s blue eyes remain before him as if close enough to touch. After a third, they seem to circle and sway around the room like lights. He leaps up in fright and slams the bottle onto the table, shattering it, then makes for the door. Jankiel blocks him and demands payment, refusing to extend credit. Antek threatens him with death if he does not move. Jankiel pales and steps aside; Antek crashes through the door and runs out.

The episode ends not with work secured or reconciliation achieved, but with Antek again in flight. His first movement away from home has carried him only from Hanka’s grief to the sight of Jagna, and from the inn to a fresh outburst. The snowbound departure therefore holds together two opposing impulses: the desire to escape the humiliations and legal defeat awaiting him in Lipce, and the emotional past that remains vivid enough to stop him in his tracks.