The mob drives Jagna out of the village

The mob drives Jagna out of the village in a violent procession that turns collective judgment into public humiliation. A crowd storms Dominikowa’s home, beats those who try to protect Jagusia, and carries her away on a dung-laden cart; at the churchyard, Ambrozy’s threat to use a shotgun prevents a further assault on church grounds. The mob finally dumps Jagusia beyond the village boundary and pelts her with earth and stones, leaving her alone in the rain.

The Mob Storms Dominikowa’s Home

The expulsion begins amid a village-wide surge of anger. Groups gather by the pond, shouting and railing until the sound resembles distant thunder. Those more cautious shut themselves inside their cottages or flee to the fields; the rest are drawn into a crowd whose fury spreads through the village. The episode is presented not as an orderly communal decision but as a rush of collective violence.

Led by the organist’s wife and the Voyt’s wife, the crowd descends on Dominikowa’s house and bursts into the cottage with such force that its walls shake. Dominikowa bars the way and is trampled. Jędrzych leaps to defend her, but the mob turns on him as well. At the storeroom, Mateusz tries to hold the attackers back with a bar and fights with all his strength; almost immediately he is left unconscious against the wall, his head split open.

Jagusia has been shut inside the storeroom. When the crowd tears down the door, she stands pressed against the wall, making no sound and offering no resistance. Her pallor and fixed stare register the terror of the moment. The mob seizes her from every side and pulls her out into the farmyard, treating her less as a person to be confronted than as someone to be forcibly removed.

The Procession and the Churchyard

The crowd puts Jagusia on a cart waiting on the road, harnessed to two black cows and piled high with pigs’ dung. The Voyt’s wife insists that Jagusia be tied so she cannot escape; trussed like a sheep, she is thrown onto the load. The procession sets off amid insults, laughter, and curses, converting the village’s judgment into a public spectacle of degradation.

In front of the church, the mob’s violence threatens to become still more direct: voices call for Jagusia to be stripped and whipped there. The closed graveyard gate blocks their way, and Ambrozy stands guard with the parish priest’s shotgun. He warns that he will shoot anyone who enters the church grounds. The crowd desists and drives on along the poplar road, while the sky darkens, wind lashes the trees, dust blinds the marchers, and thunder gathers around them.

Cast Out Beyond the Boundary

At the boundary mounds beneath the wood, the crowd lifts the cart’s boards and throws Jagusia down with the dung. She lands on her back and does not move. The Voyt’s wife kicks her and warns that the dogs will be set on her if she returns, then throws a stone or clod at her in the name of her children; another attacker blames her for shaming the village. The blows and curses continue as Jagusia lies motionless, looking up at the trees swaying above her. The crowd’s claim to punish her has carried her outside the village, but it does not end at expulsion: even at the boundary, the mob continues to assault and condemn her.

Rain begins to fall heavily. Pietrek lingers with the cart, but the others leave in groups, turning back toward the village in a strange silence. On the way they meet Dominikowa, bloodied and with her clothes torn, hurrying and feeling her way with her stick as she weeps. The reversal from the crowd’s earlier roaring to its quiet return leaves Jagusia alone beyond the boundary and Dominikowa to make her way back injured; the community’s punishment has produced no reconciliation, only further bodily harm and separation.

The Boundary as a Sentence

The expulsion turns the village boundary into more than a point of departure: it becomes the place where the crowd tries to make its verdict irreversible. Its curses invoke the holy earth itself, wishing that it reject Jagusia and that hunger and thirst finish what the beating began. The language casts banishment as a judgment by both community and landscape, while the violence makes clear that this supposed moral authority is being enforced by force rather than by any process of reconciliation.

The scene’s animal and bodily comparisons strip Jagusia of social personhood in stages: she is tied like a sheep, thrown down like a carcass, and left lying as still as a log. Yet the natural world does not confirm the mob’s sentence. Jagusia watches the trees above her, and rain falls over the scene; the crowd can remove her from the village, but its denunciations cannot make the earth speak for it. That contrast leaves the expulsion morally unresolved: the community has acted with the certainty of a tribunal, but the scene presents the result as abandonment and injury, not justice.