Antek and Jagna rekindle their old love, and he proposes eloping

Antek and Jagusia’s meeting at the barn turns a delayed reunion into a reckoning over desire, coercion, and escape. Antek tries to restore their intimacy through tenderness, but Jagusia names the harm in what has happened and rejects his claim to possess her. His sudden proposal that they leave together cannot undo that rupture: she refuses and goes home alone.

Arrival and expectation

The meeting follows Antek’s conversation with the priest, who says he would help if he could, offers to say a Mass for Antek’s intention on the Feast of the Transfiguration, and asks him to help drive the horses into the stable. Antek is so troubled by his difficulties that he does not remember Jagusia until he is leaving the priest’s farmyard. He then rushes to find her. The sequence makes his arrival late rather than planned as a punctual meeting, and his attention shifts abruptly from the priest’s practical requests and religious offer to the woman waiting for him.

Jagusia is crouched by the barn. She tells him that she has waited and waited, her voice hoarse from the dew. Antek asks whether he could have got away from the priest and moves to embrace her, but she pushes him back. Her first gesture establishes that the reunion is not a simple resumption of their former closeness: she has been waiting, yet she does not welcome his attempt to take her in his arms. The barn is at once the place where they meet and the setting for a dispute over what their intimacy means.

Tenderness and coercion

Their argument brings Antek’s resentment into the open. He reproaches Jagusia for becoming involved with anyone who wanted her and casts himself as someone who had trapped her by making her his stepmother. She answers that he should have forbidden her, and that if he had loved her he would not have left her alone but protected her from misfortune. Her complaint shifts the encounter away from his accusation and toward the abandonment she says she experienced. The narration describes her speaking with painful desolation; Antek’s grievances dissolve, and love stirs in him again.

Antek responds with physical comfort. He sits Jagusia beside him on the barn’s beam, presses her to his heart, strokes her hair, wipes her tear-stained face, and kisses her lips and eyes. She clings to him and rests her head on his breast, as if seeking the safety of a mother’s heart in which to release her grief. The scene makes the tenderness concrete, but it also marks a dangerous change: her trust and tears are followed by Antek’s growing desire. He kisses her more fiercely and grips her more forcefully, while she initially does not recognize where his actions are leading.

When Jagusia understands that she is in his power, she struggles and begs him to let her go, warning that she will scream. The narration emphasizes her breathlessness and trembling as Antek holds her. Later, she gives the encounter its own name: she says he forced her like a ruffian. This accusation is essential to the scene’s meaning. His embrace has not simply healed the quarrel or confirmed a shared passion; the physical encounter crosses a boundary she explicitly tries to defend. The tenderness that briefly lets her trust him becomes inseparable from her experience of being overpowered.

The proposal to flee

Afterward, Antek again seeks her lips and whispers endearments, but Jagusia turns away and stares at the moon. He grows impatient, then morose and regretful as they sit without knowing what to say. Her response is not reconciliation: she says that everything in her has gone out and crumbled to ashes, and repeats that he forced her. When he asks whether she is not his, she pushes him away and insists that she belongs neither to him nor to anyone else.

Only after this rejection does Antek ask whether she would go away into the world with him. He names America as a possible destination and, seizing her by the waist, kisses her face while pleading that they run away and remain together. His hopes and plans come out in a rush; the narration compares his sudden fixation on flight to a drunk clinging to a fence. The proposal offers an imagined escape from their present circumstances, but it arrives amid Jagusia’s accusation, not after a settled agreement between them.

Jagusia refuses. She says she would not dream of running off with him and asks what reason she has to do so when she is not badly off alone. She wraps her apron around herself, looks about carefully, and says that it is late and she must run. Antek tries to dismiss the urgency by saying that no one is watching out for her at home. Jagusia answers by turning his attention back to his own household: Hanka is already airing the quilt and sighing, she says. The remark makes the consequences of his proposed escape immediate and domestic, rather than allowing his promise of a life together to stand on its own.

Significance of the encounter

The scene moves through distinct reversals: Jagusia waits but resists Antek’s first embrace; his tender response to her complaint gives way to force; her accusation blocks his claim of possession; and his proposal of escape meets a clear refusal. Each reversal complicates any easy reading of the meeting as a romantic reunion. Jagusia’s tears and physical closeness do not cancel her protests, and Antek’s renewed declaration of love does not settle the question of what she wants.

The ending with Jagusia preparing to leave keeps the proposed flight unresolved and preserves her refusal as the scene’s final decision. Antek imagines that a departure together could make their intimacy permanent; Jagusia declines that future and returns the conversation to the realities surrounding them, including Hanka waiting at home. The encounter therefore renews the emotional bond between Antek and Jagusia while exposing how unequal and unstable it has become: desire is present, but so are resentment, injury, and Jagusia’s insistence that she is no one’s possession.