Antek Begins Working at the Sawmill

Antek Begins Working at the Sawmill marks a sharp change in Antek’s position: the skilled son of Boryna becomes a hired worker under Mateusz the Young Villager, a man he already resents and regards as a rival for Jagusia. The work offers employment, but its immediate cost is status. As Antek learns to split logs and endure the winter day after day, the sawmill makes an existing personal hostility unavoidable and public.

The plea for work

The hiring begins with a woman appealing to The Miller on Antek’s behalf. She says that she has heard there is work at the mill and begs him to take Antek on, clasping his legs, kissing his hands, and breaking into tears as she pleads. Her appeal makes the employment more than a casual arrangement: someone close to Antek is willing to humble herself to secure it. The exchange also conveys that he has not been eager to take the job. One speaker remarks that he is neither a farmhand nor a laborer and therefore is not rushing to start; another expresses pity for him despite describing him as wolf-like, stubborn, and lacking respect for his family.

The Miller eventually agrees, but does not promise easy work or make the offer sound generous. There is a place for Antek, he says, but the work is hard: sawing wood. The distinction matters. The offer is a chance to earn a living, not a restoration of the standing Antek has lost. He is to enter a working yard where the labor is demanding and another man will direct him.

A Boryna takes orders

The following morning, after breakfast, The Miller hires Antek and leaves him among great heaps of logs in the yard. He then goes to find Mateusz the Young Villager, who is arranging the wood and setting the saws in motion. Before departing, The Miller instructs Antek to do what Mateusz says, placing Mateusz in charge in his absence. The authority is explicit from the start: Antek has not merely accepted physical work but must obey the man whose judgment and standing he already contests.

Bartek is also at work in the yard. Antek joins him and begins heaving logs and splitting them lengthwise into straight-edged pieces, following Bartek’s tar marks. He does not answer or complain aloud. Instead, the thought that a Boryna is taking orders from someone like Mateusz strikes him hard. He spits on his palms and grips the axe angrily, while Bartek acknowledges that he is doing the work well. Antek’s skill is real; handling wood is familiar to him. But competence does not erase the humiliation of his new place in the hierarchy.

The labor quickly exposes the difference between knowing how to work wood and sustaining the pace of mill work. Antek grows breathless and sweaty and throws off his sheepskin. The scene places his physical ability beside the strain of the job: he can do it, but it taxes a body unused to such continuous exertion. His first response is not to withdraw. He stays at the task, despite the discomfort and the anger he cannot openly convert into refusal.

Work under Mateusz

The hiring opens a succession of difficult days. Antek must rise at dawn and work through biting frost, gales, heavy snow, and thawing weather that leaves him standing in wet snow. The four saws consume wood so quickly that the workers struggle to keep pace, while Mateusz presses them on. The weather is not incidental hardship but part of the job’s relentless terms: the work continues across changing winter conditions, with little respite from cold or exhaustion.

Antek gradually becomes accustomed to the physical demands. What he cannot accept is Mateusz’s authority. Mateusz’s badgering repeatedly provokes him; sometimes Antek snarls back, and sometimes the other man’s remarks make his skin tingle and his fists clench. He nevertheless restrains himself, calms down, and stores the insults in his memory. Antek believes Mateusz is waiting for an opportunity to dismiss him, so every provocation carries the practical threat of losing the work as well as the personal sting of being ordered about.

Mateusz does not have to insult Antek directly to intensify the pressure. He picks at him indirectly, finding ways to strike a vulnerable point, and takes pleasure in reminding others that Antek works for him and obeys him. In Mateusz’s telling, Antek is humble as a rabbit because he wants to avoid being sacked. That image reverses Antek’s own sense of himself as one of the village’s strongest men. The employment makes their unequal positions visible: Mateusz commands, while Antek must hold his temper to keep the job.

The rivalry beneath the hiring

Their hostility predates the sawmill. The two men had long pursued Jagusia, beginning before spring or perhaps as early as Shrovetide, and each knew the other was doing so. Mateusz made little effort to conceal his affections and spoke openly about them; Antek had to keep his own pursuit hidden. The contrast gives their quarrels at work an emotional charge beyond ordinary friction between a supervisor and a laborer. Mateusz’s authority over Antek rubs against the rivalry Antek already feels, while Antek’s concealed desire deepens his envy of Mateusz’s more open approach.

They had never been friends. They watched and goaded one another before other people, each considering himself the village’s strongest man. At the sawmill, that competitive tension hardens into a daily relationship of command and resistance. Within about a week, they stop greeting each other and merely pass with hostile, watchful looks. The job does not create their conflict; it gives that conflict a routine setting and a practical consequence.

The episode also complicates the rivalry by showing that Mateusz is not simply cruel or ungenerous. He is described as capable of generosity and willing to help, but also self-assured, inclined to lord it over others, and convinced that no girl has refused him. His habit of boasting about his success with women and his superiority helps explain why he flaunts Antek’s subordinate position. By contrast, Antek’s anger remains largely contained because he needs the work. The sawmill thus binds economic dependence to wounded pride: he can master the axe and endure the weather, but he cannot make himself accept Mateusz as his equal—or his superior—without resentment.