The Lipce mill serves Lipce as more than a place to grind grain: it is a workplace, a busy exchange point, and a setting where economic dependence becomes visible. Grain and flour pass through its rooms, but so do villagers seeking work, waiting their turn, trading news, and asking for credit. The mill’s importance rests on ordinary necessities—and on the miller’s power to decide who receives them.

Work and daily business

In winter, the mill becomes a place of employment for Antek. The miller takes him on and leaves him among piles of logs in the yard, then tells him to follow Mateusz the Young Villager, who is arranging the wood and setting the saws in motion. With the miller away, Mateusz is explicitly in charge. The arrangement places Antek inside a work hierarchy rather than simply among the mill’s customers: access to wages comes with orders to follow and tasks to learn.

The mill also handles the household’s debts and purchases. Hanka meets the miller there and pays what she owes for groats and flour. He sweeps the money into a drawer and remarks that she is eating up her cow; Hanka answers that there is no alternative to buying food. The exchange makes the mill’s commerce intimate and immediate. Grain and flour are not abstract goods: their cost presses directly on a household’s means of survival.

A gathering place in winter

Just before Yuletide, the mill is crowded with people whose grain is being ground and others seated in the miller’s room. Mateusz the Young Villager holds the attention of the company with a curious story, drawing bursts of laughter. Antek arrives looking for Franek, learns that Franek is elsewhere, and waits on sacks while the mill continues working around him.

The machinery gives the setting a forceful, almost overwhelming presence. The mill clatters and shudders; its wheels beat without pause as water tumbles over them. While waiting, Antek hears Mateusz the Young Villager recount a ribald story about an old man tending to Jagustynka with extravagant solicitude. The laughter and Antek’s response place private conduct under public scrutiny: the mill is where a tale becomes shared entertainment and where village knowledge circulates, whether or not its listener intends to take part.

Antek later grinds barley and leaves around midnight, while Mateusz the Young Villager remains in a room at the mill after being injured in a fight with Antek. The mill thus contains both routine labor and the aftermath of violence. Its work does not stop for the conflict: grain is ground, people remain gathered, and the building holds the consequences of a quarrel alongside its ordinary business.

Credit, scarcity, and authority

By the time harvest preparations begin, the roads and mill are crowded with people from Lipce and neighboring villages. Many have brought grain to be ground, but a shortage of water leaves only one gristmill working, and that one barely turns. Even so, people wait for their place because they want their grain milled before harvest. The scene links the mill’s operation to the agricultural calendar: a slow or inaccessible mill can obstruct a task that must be completed in time.

The miller’s house is crowded too, with customers seeking flour, groats, and bread. Although the miller is ill, he continues to direct decisions from inside, calling instructions to his wife through an open window. He refuses credit to people from Rzepki because they have taken their cows to the priest’s bull, insisting that they should seek credit from the priest instead. Pleas for help, including those made on behalf of poorer customers, do not soften his refusal. He will not extend even a small measure of flour on credit to those households.

His wife appears more sympathetic to people in need: disgruntled and tearful, with her face bound, she nonetheless gives credit secretly when she can. The contrast within the household reveals competing responses to the same scarcity. The miller enforces the terms of access; his wife quietly makes exceptions. For Kłębowa, who has no money in the house, refusal means leaving troubled and in tears. The mill’s control of essential goods therefore reaches beyond the machinery and into the practical choices available to the village poor.

The prospect of a rival

The mill’s authority is not secure. After hearing that the miller will not give credit, Kłębowa learns from Magda that a windmill is planned near the shrine at Podlesie. Magda says her husband, the blacksmith, has gone to the forest with Mateusz the Young Villager to select the wood for its construction. Antek confirms the news to Hanka: the blacksmith has bought twenty morgen at Podlesie beside the shrine and intends to build there.

For Antek, the proposed windmill matters because the current miller has made life difficult for many people; he expects the competition to humble him. The mill’s role in Lipce is consequently defined by a tension between practical service and concentrated local power. It gathers the village around a shared need, but its dependence on limited water, the miller’s decisions, and credit restrictions makes that service vulnerable. The planned mill at Podlesie offers the possibility of another source of grinding—and a challenge to the authority that has governed access at the Lipce mill.