Jagna’s expulsion from Lipce turns communal judgment into public violence. After the villagers decide to banish her, a mob drags her from Dominikowa’s house, binds her to a dung cart, and casts her beyond the village boundary. The episode makes the village’s customary authority visible in its most coercive form: a decision reached in the name of communal order becomes an assault on an isolated woman, while the few who try to intervene are themselves beaten or overruled.

From private grievance to public judgment

The expulsion begins not with an open assembly but with anger gathering around the Voyt’s wife. A crowd, urged on by the organist’s wife, goes to her home. They first embrace and commiserate with her while she weeps; only then does the organist’s wife bring Jagna into the conversation. The Voyt’s wife blames Jagna for her own injuries and shame, and collapses into sobbing. The crowd’s sympathy for her soon becomes the starting point for a plan against Jagna.

After most of the visitors leave, the organist’s wife stays behind with the Voyt’s wife. The two women shut themselves away, then move through the village on quiet business. The Płoszkas join them, and the group goes to the Parish Priest. He refuses to take part, saying that they must act as they please and that he will leave for Żarnowo the next morning. His withdrawal does not halt the preparations; it leaves the villagers to deliberate among themselves.

The evening becomes a succession of arguments, negotiations, and whispered consultations. At the inn, the organist and his wife provide refreshments as leading farmers and most of the married women gather. The meeting’s claim to represent the whole village is made explicit when Płoszkowa calls for Antek Boryna: without the first among Lipce’s farmers, she says, the assembly would not be valid. Antek is summoned with the warning that refusing to attend could make the women think he is shielding Jagna or opposing the community.

A vote made under pressure

At the crowded inn, the organist stands on a bench and frames Jagna as a danger to the village’s very structure. He compares the community to a house whose supports are gradually removed and argues that unchecked wrongdoing will bring divine punishment on everyone, not only on the person accused. He invokes scripture to urge the crowd to cast Jagna out before her supposed sins bring retribution. His speech turns a dispute about one woman into a claim about collective survival and religious duty.

Antek remains silent through the address. He is pale and anguished, drinks repeatedly, and quietly curses, but does not interrupt the speaker. When Płoszka calls on him before the whole inn to state his view, the room falls silent. Antek says that he lives in the village and stands with it: if the people want Jagna cast out, they should cast her out. He leaves without looking at anyone. His answer settles the public question in the crowd’s favor, though his earlier distress and private anger make the assent more complicated than a simple expression of conviction.

The deliberations continue almost until dawn. By morning, the decision to expel Jagna is known throughout Lipce. The account stresses how little room there is for dissent: people shout down those who might defend her. Mateusz alone openly curses the gathering and rushes to Antek’s home, trembling as he reports what has been decided. Antek answers curtly that they have the right. The exchange reveals that he will not use his standing to reverse the verdict, even as Mateusz refuses the community’s claim to speak with one voice.

The assault and the cart

As the village descends into what the narrative presents as a delirium of judgment, prudent residents shut themselves indoors or flee to the fields; others gather near the pond. The crowd, led by the organist’s wife and the Voyt’s wife, surges toward Dominikowa’s house and bursts into the cottage. Dominikowa blocks its way and is trampled. Jędrzych leaps to defend her and is attacked in turn. Mateusz tries to hold the line at the storeroom with a bar, but is struck on the head and left unconscious against the wall.

Jagna has been shut in the storeroom. When the crowd breaks down the door, she stands pressed against the wall, silent and making no attempt to fight back. The narration describes her as corpse-white, with horror and death in her staring eyes. A mass of hands seizes her and pulls her into the farmyard. At the Voyt’s wife’s suggestion that Jagna might escape, the crowd binds her. They throw her onto a cart drawn by two black cows and filled with pigs’ dung, then drive through the village amid insults, laughter, and curses.

The procession stops outside the church. Some of the crowd demand that Jagna be stripped and beaten in the vestibule, invoking the church as the customary setting for punishment. The closed graveyard gate and Ambrozy’s intervention prevent them from entering the church grounds. Holding the Parish Priest’s shotgun, he threatens to shoot anyone who tries. The mob turns away and continues along the poplar road. This interruption limits where the assault can proceed, but it does not end the banishment.

Beyond the boundary

Pietrek, the Borynas’ farmhand, leads the cart because no one else will. When he can, he whispers words of pity and encouragement to Jagna. She lies in fetters, her clothes in rags, bruised and weeping, apparently unable to respond to what is happening around her. At the boundary mounds beneath the wood, the crowd lifts the cart’s boards and throws her down with the dung. The Voyt’s wife kicks her and threatens to set dogs on her if she returns; stones, clods, sand, and blows follow. Jagna lies motionless, looking up at the trees.

Rain begins to fall. Pietrek lingers with the cart while the villagers return in groups, strangely quiet. On the way they meet Dominikowa, bloodied, with torn clothes and a stick in her hand. Though she has been trampled and must feel her way as she identifies those passing, she curses the crowd and strides toward Jagna’s rescue. The episode ends with her hurrying to her daughter as the storm intensifies; it does not describe what happens after she reaches her.

Custom, gender, and collective violence

The accompanying historical notes distinguish this village punishment from banishment in towns. In towns, an authority such as a magistrate or elder pronounced the sentence; in the countryside, the whole village community customarily did so. The notes also explain the mob’s reference to a beating beside the church: village punishment was carried out near the settlement’s principal building, whereas a town’s flogging took place beside the town hall. The villagers’ actions thus claim the standing of custom, even as the episode shows custom being enacted through a disorderly and brutal crowd.

The punishment is directed at Jagna’s body and public reputation. She is tied, displayed, insulted, and deposited outside the community, while the crowd presents her removal as protection of village order. The contrast between that justification and the violence inflicted on Dominikowa, Jędrzych, Mateusz, and Jagna exposes the cost of treating collective condemnation as sufficient proof of guilt. Antek’s assent, Mateusz’s resistance, Ambrozy’s armed warning, and Dominikowa’s attempt to reach her daughter mark different responses to a judgment that the assembly has made difficult to challenge. The storm supplies no verdict of its own, but its arrival coincides with the crowd’s retreat and Dominikowa’s movement toward Jagna, leaving the expulsion’s immediate aftermath unresolved.