Beggars cannot be choosers

Beggars cannot be choosers is a proverb of constrained necessity in Lipce: it gives a familiar, resigned form to decisions made under want, when refusing an available option may be impossible. Its recurrence links Antek Boryna’s household crisis to his loss of standing as a worker, while the hardships of poorer villagers reveal the social cost hidden inside the saying’s apparent practicality.

Meaning and Recurrence

The expression appears twice in circumstances of material pressure. In both, choice is not absent in an abstract sense; rather, poverty makes the alternatives costly or unavailable. The proverb can sound like acceptance, but the scenes that surround it show the losses and humiliations that acceptance entails.

The repetitions also trace a change in Antek’s position. At home, he faces the sale of a valued animal because the family needs money and lacks fodder. Later, he applies the same logic to taking work under conditions that wound his pride. The familiar saying binds these moments together without making them equivalent: one concerns a household’s dwindling means of survival, the other Antek’s submission to a new place in the labor hierarchy.

The Last Cow and Household Need

When Hanka Borynowa asks whether they must sell, Antek answers that they need the money and have too little fodder to keep two animals. He acknowledges the cow’s value, but says that necessity leaves no alternative. His voice is quiet and kind, and Hanka responds not by grieving the animal but by attending to his tenderness. For a moment, their emotional closeness changes the meaning of the decision: the loss remains real, yet his kindness offers her hope.

Hanka tries to make the consequences manageable. She agrees that they must sell, then points to the heifer and imagines getting it in calf by mid-Lent so that there will still be some milk. Her response shows how the proverb works in daily life: it does not remove deliberation, but confines it to whatever small possibilities remain. The family can plan around the sale, but cannot simply choose to keep the cow without regard to money and winter fodder.

Work and Lost Standing

The second occurrence comes as Antek begins work beside Bartek from the Sawmill. He takes up the axe, hauls logs, and splits wood to the marks Bartek has made. The task itself is familiar to him, but the arrangement is humiliating: he is taking orders from Mateusz. Antek says nothing, spits on his palms, and keeps working with an angry grip on the axe. The proverb here accompanies not only economic compulsion but also a reversal of status.

Antek can work wood, yet the labor quickly leaves him breathless and sweating; he throws off his sheepskin. His competence does not spare him the physical strain or erase the fact that he must accept another man’s direction. Set beside the cow sale, this scene makes the saying a refrain of material decline. At home, necessity takes an animal from the household; at the sawmill, it places Antek in work he accepts despite his anger and wounded pride.

Private Need and Public Injustice

The saying’s reach extends beyond Antek’s circumstances. Villagers describe hired hands desperate for work, families whose potatoes have frozen, and poor people eating a hot meal only once a day before going to bed hungry. In that setting, limited choice is not merely an individual failing or a temporary inconvenience. It reflects a village economy in which work, food, and credit are scarce, especially during winter and before the next harvest.

The same conditions sharpen the dispute over the felling at Wolf’s Hollow woodland. The Squire’s refusal to employ men from Lipce threatens work that villagers had expected, while their complaints about the manor’s conduct have brought them no relief. A speech to farmers and hired hands gathers these grievances into a shared charge of injustice: the forest is being felled, employment withheld, and appeals left unanswered. This public insistence that the villagers have a right to resist contrasts with the proverb’s private logic of having to accept what is available.

A speaker’s account of hunger and hardship likewise challenges the comfortable use of necessity as an excuse for indifference. Poor families lack food, money, and help; meanwhile, better-off farmers are depicted as absorbed in their own concerns, leaving the poor to divine care. Read against that contrast, the proverb names a real constraint but does not justify the conditions that produce it. Its force lies in the gap between having to make do and accepting that those with resources need not help.