Antek seeks the priest’s counsel after the dispute with Boryna

Antek Boryna’s attempt to seek counsel from The Parish Priest becomes a confrontation over the limits of filial obedience and the meaning of justice. While the priest searches in a strengthening wind for a missing, blind mare, Antek is asked to restrain his anger toward Maciej Boryna. He calls his cause justice, but cannot answer when the priest asks whether he is really pursuing vengeance; as the exchange sharpens, Antek voices his despair at a world in which a father can wrong his children without their being permitted to object, and leaves with his anger unresolved.

The search and the unwanted errand

The meeting unfolds outdoors in rough weather. The wind batters the poplars and makes the priest cough, interrupting his words. He is searching the road, fields, and trees for a mare that has wandered off. The animal is blind and old, at least twenty years of age, and the priest says he raised her from a filly. His concern is not abstract: he fears she may blunder into a fence and break her legs.

Antek has come to speak about his own troubles, but instead finds himself walking beside the priest during the search. He is irritated that he has been scolded and drawn into looking for the mare when he hoped to air his sorrows. He concedes that the animal deserves pity, yet resents the diversion: to him, a human grievance should take precedence. The small errand exposes the imbalance he feels in the encounter. The priest’s attention is fixed on a vulnerable creature in immediate danger; Antek wants his own injury and claim to justice heard.

Counsel on anger and filial duty

The priest directs Antek to pull himself together and abandon vengeance, stressing that Maciej Boryna is the head of his family. He frames the matter in religious and familial terms: raising a hand against one’s father in passion is a mortal sin and an offense against God. Antek acknowledges that he understands the prohibition, but understanding does not settle the question that brought him there. He says that he wants justice.

The priest challenges that distinction directly, asking whether Antek is seeking vengeance instead. Antek has no answer. The pause matters: his stated principle remains justice, but the exchange leaves open whether anger has overtaken the claim he makes on its behalf. Rather than resolve the dispute between father and son, the counsel identifies the moral danger in Antek’s response to it. The priest’s appeal asks for restraint; Antek experiences restraint as another demand that he accept what he considers a wrong.

The priest then offers a proverb about a meek calf suckling more than one mother. Antek answers that everyone tells him to be meek and that he can endure no more. He generalizes from his own family conflict to a bitter account of power: a man may be violent or a wrongdoer, he argues, yet his position as father allows him to do as he pleases, while his children are denied the right to claim redress. His protest is therefore both personal and an indictment of the hierarchy that, in his view, protects the father and silences the child.

Leaving, and the threat of violence

Antek’s anger turns toward departure. He says that if this is the way the world is ordered, there is nothing left but to reject it and go wherever his eyes lead. The priest, in an impulsive reply, tells him to go if he wishes. Antek’s answer is quieter: perhaps he will leave; he asks what remains for him there. The movement from defiance to near-tearful speech registers not a decision completed but a possibility that has begun to feel real.

The priest counters that other people own no fields and nevertheless stay, work, and thank God. He urges Antek to use his strength rather than complain, pointing out that he still has three morgen of land. Antek throws the figure back mockingly. The exchange makes the land itself a measure of the disagreement: the priest presents work and what Antek possesses as grounds for endurance, while Antek’s scorn shows that the allotted acreage does not answer his sense of injustice.

When the talk turns to justice at the manor, Antek remarks that it will soon arrive when a few of its men feel the edge of an axe. The priest rebukes him for speaking foolishly in anger, but Antek is no longer listening. He swerves away and disappears into the shadows; the priest hurries toward the presbytery after hearing the rumble of wheels and the mare’s faint, forlorn whinny. Antek, meanwhile, goes down through the village toward the mill and takes the far side of the pond so that he will not pass Jagna’s house. His path avoids the house, but not the attachment: Jagna remains lodged in his heart like a splinter he can neither remove nor ignore.

Significance of the encounter

The scene brings together three pressures without reconciling them: the religious command to honor one’s father, Antek’s demand that a wrong be answered, and the practical question of whether he can remain in Lipce. The priest offers obedience, work, and restraint; Antek hears in those prescriptions another version of the meekness he has been asked to accept. His claim to justice is complicated by his inability to dismiss vengeance and by his threat against the manor, which the priest immediately recognizes as anger speaking.

The search for the mare gives the argument a concrete counterpoint. While the priest worries about an old animal’s safety and continues looking for her, Antek feels that his own human trouble has been displaced. By the end, neither the father–son grievance nor Antek’s intention to stay or leave has been settled. He departs into the shadows, avoiding Jagna’s home while carrying his desire with him; the conversation has exposed the forces pulling him in different directions, not released him from them.