Endure My Heart Read Online Free PDF

leg of rubber beef. With Andrew and myself both working, we had lost our heads and hired a woman to cook and clean. She cleaned better than she cooked, and she was no great shakes with a bar of soap, but she needed the job.
    “Society has become badly depraved,” he told me.
    “I meant the smugglers, Andrew.”
    “Ah, those gentlemen. Why, they are criminals.” My heart sank. I too was a criminal then.
    “Yes, the foolish laws have made criminals of honest men,” he rambled on, giving me a rush of hope.
    “It is a foolish law, is it not?” I urged him on.
    “It is a criminal law, if I may be permitted to indulge in a paradoxical statement.” I permitted him to indulge in as many as he wanted, if I understood his meaning. We discussed the matter with enthusiasm all through the elastic beef and concrete sponge cake our cook had served up. Andrew will occasionally unbend to orate on an abstraction, but when I tried to take him a buttonhole lower to actual cases, he began turning his views around to conclude, “Of course, everyone ought to obey the laws of the land, or we would have chaos.”
    “Even the bad laws?” I asked.
    “Laws are not generally bad. They are made to protect society.”
    “Yes, but suppose, for instance, the law decreed that one man should kill another.”
    “It does so decree. We execute criminals, yet the commandment states Thou shalt not kill. There are extenuating circumstances, however. When a man puts himself beyond the law, then he must be punished.”
    “Oh, but surely God’s law must come first.”
    “God’s law is sometimes contradictory. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. Then surely by extrapolation, a life for a life.”
    “Men are executed for no less than stealing a little something. That is not an eye for an eye, but a life for a loaf.”
    Andrew considered this, while I considered that I had got badly off the point. I returned to it. I wanted his approbation. He was older, better educated and to be perfectly frank, more upright than myself.
    Round and round we went, but the best I could get out of him was that in certain undesignated circumstances, a man might be right to break a law. I dared not make the circumstances in which I was interested too explicit, so I had to be satisfied with this sort of possible exculpation.
    Andrew never took port. The minute dinner was over, he disappeared out the side door, which meant he was flying to the rafters again to wrestle with the organ. Had he not gone there, he would have immersed himself in Latin in his study. The trouble was, Andrew did not really live in the world to any significant extent. With him it was all abstraction and hypothesis. The physical facts, ignored by him, were that poor people were trying to make a living in a way that hurt no one so far as I could see, so I took counsel with my own soul, and permitted myself to break the bad law.
     

Chapter Three
     
    I quite simply adored being a smuggler. It lent a spice to that long, dull, hard winter that had been sorely lacking before. A young lady ought to have been finding her excitement in suitors; I had none. You’d be surprised how quickly your wealthy friends drop you once it is learned you are poor. Any mother with an eligible son was at pains to direct his attention elsewhere.
    Much I cared! There was not a really handsome or dashing gentleman on the whole coast, or that part of the coast which I frequented, in any case. I began to think in terms of spending a summer perhaps with my aunt, to see what sort of male specimens they grow in Devonshire. Already by April I had saved eighty guineas for the trip, for it was a busy winter. Winter is the prime time for smuggling. A little of it goes on year round, and moon round too here at Salford, but winter with a new moon is the ideal time. “The dark” the gentlemen call that short period of the lunar month when the moon is no more than a sliver in the sky. The nights are long, and the weather nippy