Antek takes work at the sawmill

Antek takes work at the sawmill after Hanka secures an opening with The Miller, exchanging the prospect of leaving the village for difficult, paid labor close to home. The employment offers a practical answer to the household’s need for bread, but it also puts Antek under Mateusz the Young Villager’s supervision. He can accustom himself to frost, snow, and exhausting work; taking orders from Mateusz is the injury he cannot readily accept.

Hanka Secures the Work

Hanka is the one who presses for the opportunity. She approaches The Miller in tears, clasping his legs and kissing his hands as she begs him to take Antek on. Her pleading makes the employment more than a casual offer: she is trying to obtain work for a man who is not asking for it himself. The Miller agrees, but makes clear that the job is hard, involving sawing wood. Hanka answers that Antek is handy at everything, a judgment that anticipates his competence once he begins.

The opening comes through Hanka’s contact with The Miller, not through a successful search by Antek. When she later asks whether he found work, Antek quietly says that he went from one manor to another and asked around. In fact, he had not seriously tried to find employment and had spent the time loitering. His account conceals his inaction, while Hanka’s news gives the conversation a more hopeful direction: The Miller has work for him at the sawmill, starting as soon as the next day, at two zlotys and fifteen groszy.

Antek is startled that Hanka went asking on his behalf. She explains that she had gone to pay a debt and that The Miller himself had said he planned to send for him. Her explanation matters: she has taken an active step toward securing his livelihood, but does not present the job as something she had directly solicited. The exchange also reveals Antek’s reluctance to seek work beyond the village. After first saying he has found nothing, he admits that he does not want to leave Lipce and wander about the world like a stray dog. Hanka shares that preference, glad that earning bread may be possible at home.

Starting at the Sawmill

The Miller takes Antek on late the next morning, after breakfast. He leaves him in the yard among great heaps of logs and goes to find Mateusz, who is arranging the wood and setting the saws in motion. Before departing, The Miller tells Antek to do whatever Mateusz says because Mateusz is in charge in his place. Thus the terms of the new employment are established at once: Antek has a job, but not the authority that might accompany his standing in the village.

Mateusz greets him in a friendly manner and asks whether he has an axe. Antek soon stands ready to work alongside Bartek. He heaves logs and splits the wood lengthwise to make straight edges, following Bartek’s tar marks. The task is familiar enough in its materials—working wood is not new to him—and he has the knack for it. Bartek recognizes that he is managing the work well. Yet Antek says nothing as he begins: the fact that a Boryna is taking orders from Mateusz has struck him hard. He spits on his palms and grips the axe angrily, making the bodily preparation for labor carry the force of a suppressed protest.

Work, Weather, and Authority

The work quickly tests Antek’s strength. Although he knows how to handle wood, the labor is hard for someone unused to it; he grows breathless and sweaty and throws off his sheepskin. The employment then settles into a punishing daily routine. He must rise at daybreak and toil whether the ground is under cruel frost, gales blast across it, heavy snow makes it difficult to see, or a thaw leaves him standing in soggy snow with damp cold climbing into his bones. When the snow whirls around him, he can scarcely see his own axe.

The sawmill’s pace compounds the strain. Four saws consume the wood so rapidly that the workers can barely keep up, while Mateusz continually hurries them along. The narrative distinguishes physical hardship from the affront Antek finds hardest to bear. He gradually grows used to the cold, foul weather, and exhausting toil; a person who sets his mind to work, the passage observes, can endure even hell. What continues to incite him is not the labor but Mateusz’s position over him and his constant badgering.

Significance of the Employment

The job brings together economic necessity and wounded status. Antek’s refusal to leave the village does not mean he has already accepted the discipline of wage labor: he has delayed seeking work, then enters the sawmill because Hanka finds an opening and The Miller offers it. His skill is real, and Bartek’s approval confirms that he can perform the task; nevertheless, the work requires him to accept a hierarchy he resents. The axe in his hands becomes both a tool of productive labor and the visible sign of his effort to master his anger.

The episode therefore marks a constrained accommodation rather than an uncomplicated change of course. Antek earns work in Lipce instead of going out into the world, and Hanka’s intervention helps keep the household’s means of support close at hand. But his daily place at the sawmill is defined by Mateusz’s authority. He can learn to endure the winter and the labor; the persistent conflict between his pride and his subordinate position remains unresolved.