Hostility between Lipce villagers and German settlers from Podlesie

Hostility between Lipce villagers and German settlers from Podlesie is expressed not as a private quarrel but as a public confrontation over who belongs in the village’s surroundings and who may claim authority over the land. When the settlers pass through Lipce in a procession of covered wagons, the villagers greet them with jeers rather than welcome. Their departure soon afterward is celebrated as a collective victory, though the villagers’ suspicion of the Squire complicates any simple account of who secured it.

A hostile reception

The settlers arrive in a dozen or so large wagons, drawn by strong horses and loaded with household goods. Women and children ride beneath the white canvas covers; the well-fed men walk alongside, smoking pipes, while enormous dogs run beside the convoy. The arrival is conspicuous, and the villagers gather to watch, some climbing over a railing to get a closer look. The procession’s scale and visible possessions contrast sharply with the hostility awaiting it.

As the wagons make their way slowly through the crush of carts and horses, none of the settlers removes his cap at the church or greets the villagers. The narrator describes them staring at the crowd, their eyes flashing and beards trembling. The Lipce villagers answer with a stream of ethnic insults, and Mateusz calls after them with challenges about who won and whether they fear peasant fists. The exchange makes the encounter more than a silent passage: each side is made to see the other, but neither offers a gesture of recognition.

The hostility nearly turns into further physical aggression. After the settlers have passed, a boy throws a stone, and other villagers begin reaching for bricks; they are stopped before the crowd can follow through. A woman raises her fist and curses the departing settlers. The restraint is brief and limited, but it marks a boundary between the crowd’s verbal assault and a more direct attack. The settlers themselves do not answer the insults; they hurry their horses onward.

Departure and the village’s celebration

The procession eventually disappears along the poplar road. Its creaking wagons and the barking of dogs fade into the dust and shadows, leaving the villagers to interpret the departure as a result of their own resistance. The contrast between the noisy, densely gathered crowd and the settlers’ retreat gives the episode the shape of a collective triumph, even though the settlers are shown leaving rather than being formally expelled in this scene.

The villagers are so pleased that they cannot settle back into prayer and crowd around the Squire. He shares snuff and announces that they have driven the settlers out. One villager jokes that the smell of their sheepskins did the work. Grzela, the Voyt’s brother, adds a mock expression of concern about how poorly the settlers can endure peasant neighbours. Such joking turns the settlers’ departure into a communal performance: the crowd retells the encounter in a way that diminishes the newcomers and confirms its own power.

The villagers’ explanation also includes reports about the settlers’ circumstances. They say the settlers had no luck in Podlesie and that their cows had failed; another speaker notes that they brought no cattle with them. These remarks circulate as village talk, not as an independently established account of why the settlers left. They nevertheless show how the crowd converts the newcomers’ misfortune into part of its victory story, reading their departure through both economic rivalry and ethnic antagonism.

The Squire’s contested credit

The Squire presents himself as the agent of the settlers’ departure. He says he prefers to sell to his own people, even at half the price, and describes his family as having consistently sided with the peasants. The villagers listen politely, but the narration makes clear that they privately doubt his account. His self-presentation as their benefactor does not erase the unequal history that shapes their view of him.

Sikora recalls that the old Squire’s orders had been enforced on his own back, and later mutters that supposed benefactors can take the yolk without breaking the shell. Kłąb pushes him to stop, suggesting that the villagers’ public deference does not amount to trust. The Squire’s claim that he arranged the settlers’ departure therefore sits beside memories of coercion and suspicion about the manor’s interests. The crowd can welcome an outcome it wants without accepting the Squire’s version of how, or for whose benefit, it came about.

Land, livelihood, and collective hostility

The antagonism belongs to a wider atmosphere of disputes over access to work, land, and the resources on which village livelihoods depend. In an earlier debate about the manor’s felling at Wolf’s Hollow, villagers point to the Squire’s refusal to hire Lipce workers and to the hardship facing hired hands through the winter. Their objections join material grievances to a claim that decisions affecting the community should not be made without regard for its people. The settlers’ presence at Podlesie is thus encountered in a village already alert to the consequences of outsiders’ claims and the manor’s control of opportunity.

The forest mobilization offers a revealing contrast, though it is a separate conflict: there Boryna calls peasants and hired hands to defend what they regard as theirs, and a large crowd acts together against the woodcutters. In the encounter with the German settlers, collective identity likewise appears through a crowd’s common voice and shared sense of grievance, but it takes the more exclusionary form of ethnic insult and intimidation. The villagers’ solidarity is powerful, yet it does not extend into impartial hospitality toward newcomers.

The episode leaves the settlers’ departure both politically satisfying to the Lipce crowd and morally unsettled. The villagers celebrate a perceived victory, repeat stories that make the newcomers appear weak, and allow the Squire to claim credit while privately remembering reasons not to trust him. Hostility here is not only a clash between two groups: it is also a test of the village’s authority to define belonging, and a scene in which solidarity against an outsider coexists with deep suspicion of power at home.