Boryna's farmhouse

Boryna's farmhouse is more than a domestic backdrop: its chamber, fire, food, and stores show how a peasant household gathers labor and provisions around the turning seasons. It is at once a place of strenuous preparation, shared meals, and village fellowship, while its security becomes newly visible in contrast with the hardship Antek and Hanka face after their expulsion.

Rooms, work, and the household's provisions

The farmhouse appears as a working complex rather than a single room. Its byre and barn hold animals and harvest stores; the house itself shelters the large chamber where the family eats and receives visitors. Before the fair, the household's tasks are divided across family members: Maciej Boryna and Kuba finish threshing wheat, Józka Borynianka and Hanka fatten a sow and select goslings for rearing, while Antek and Witek fetch brushwood from the forest. Some of the brushwood goes to the byre, and the rest is stacked against the house to help insulate its walls for winter. The sequence makes the farmhouse's security a product of coordinated work, not simply ownership.

The work continues late into the night before the fair. The wheat is finally placed in sacks on a cart in the barn, and only after everything is ready for the next day does the household sit down together for supper in Boryna's chamber. A fire of spruce branches burns in the chimney as the tired family eats slowly and quietly. The meal marks a brief pause at the end of preparation: the house gathers its workers, but their silence and fatigue remain part of the scene.

Food and the rhythm of shared meals

Meals in the farmhouse reveal both abundance and the practical effort required to feed a large household. On one occasion, the dinner includes meat, cabbage with peas, chicken soup with potatoes, and barley groats roasted with pork fat. The family eats gravely and without conversation until its immediate hunger is satisfied. Because Józia Borynianka is cooking, she takes her place only briefly, watching the bowls empty and hurrying to bring out more food so that no one can complain the portions are meagre. The meal's plenty is therefore shown through a precise domestic routine: cooking, serving, and replenishing are as visible as the food itself.

That plenty exists within a village economy under pressure. As St Kordula's Day approaches, households argue over what to sell and what they must buy before winter. Taxes, commune contributions, debts, and payments to servants accumulate; even farmers with fifteen morgen may have to take a horse or cow to market, while poorer households face still sharper choices. Against this background, Boryna's preparations—finished wheat, a fattened sow, and goslings set aside for rearing—show a household planning around seasonal needs, even as the narrator makes clear that ready cash is scarce throughout Lipce.

The chamber as a village gathering place

The farmhouse chamber can also open beyond the family. On a day of communal cabbage preparation, a crowd gathers there around the fire. Glazed pictures catch the light, and coloured wafer globes sway from threads beneath the smoke-blackened beams. Girls and older women sit in rows, peeling the outer leaves from red cabbages and tossing the heads onto a sheet beneath the window. Jagna warms her hands at the stove, leaves her clogs by the window, and sits down beside the elderly Jagustynka to join the work. The room fills as more women arrive; several lads help Kuba carry cabbages from the barn, though they often spend their time smoking, grinning at the girls, and joking together.

When Boryna enters, the same chamber becomes a stage for household standing and social attention. He greets those present one by one, speaking more loudly and constantly than usual, and wants to sit beside Jagna, but hesitates under the watchful eyes of the gathering because the agreement is not yet settled. The scene links private intention to public scrutiny: even a place at the fireside carries social meaning when the village is present. Meanwhile, Witek and Kuba bring another bench to the fire, Józia Borynianka covers it with clean linen and arranges bowls and spoons, and Boryna fetches a large bottle of spirits from the storeroom to offer drinks around. Furniture, linen, food, and drink turn the workroom into a place of hospitality and collective observation.

Household authority and the quiet house

The farmhouse is also a site where authority is exercised through ordinary work. After the betrothal has occupied the village, the house itself is unusually quiet. Maciej Boryna stays home while Antek, Kuba, and the women go to the forest to gather brushwood and look for pine needles. He has been irritable since daybreak: he thrashes Witek over the cows, quarrels with Antek, shouts at Hanka because her child has crawled outside and become muddy, and scolds Józka Borynianka for delaying the horses. These incidents place the household's work under the old farmer's control, but they also show how his agitation falls upon everyone around him. The farmhouse is not simply a refuge from village pressure; it is a hierarchy lived out in daily tasks and reprimands.

The quiet is sharpened by what has happened outside the house. Boryna's children and the blacksmith do not know of the betrothal, and others are wary of carrying the news to them for fear of their anger. The contrast between village knowledge and domestic ignorance makes the farmhouse a threshold between public affairs and family conflict: a decision can occupy the village while remaining unspoken within the household itself.

Security, expulsion, and the wider season

The material importance of Boryna's home becomes clearer when Antek and Hanka are living apart from the paternal homestead. In their winter hardship, they have only potatoes and salt, no money, and the prospect of selling their cow; Hanka remembers that they were turned out three weeks earlier, and their resentment has not eased. That scene is not a description of Boryna's farmhouse, but it establishes what losing a place in the household means: vulnerability to cold and want, with few resources to carry the family through until spring. The contrast throws the farmhouse's barn, byre, food, and shared labor into relief without making them an effortless guarantee against poverty.

Later, the crisis of the imprisoned men widens from individual households to the whole village. Spring brings drying fields and earth ready for ploughing, yet working men are in jail and women are left to manage livestock, births, gardens, drainage, manure, wood, and children as well as the fields. When neighboring villagers arrive to help, the empty fields revive: carts roll out, ploughs move along the paths, and people cross themselves before sowing. The farmhouse belongs to this larger seasonal economy of work and mutual dependence. Its rooms and stores make household life visible in intimate detail; the neglected fields beyond it show how quickly domestic organization falters when labor is taken away.