Read The Curfew for Free Online Page A

time.
    *Just a short one. Short!
    A SHORT GAME of THIS & THAT
    which is a game of clues hidden among things in the house, woven in messages and riddles.
    It was a family inheritance and Molly adored it above all things.
    —You go sit by the window and ONLY look out.
    Molly grumbled silently.
    —Go on.
    *Going.
    William found a pad of paper, a scissors, string, and a pencil. He sat on the edge of the table and surveyed the room.
    How to begin?
    There was a photograph of a little bird falling out of a nest. That’s a good place to start, eh?
    William wrote then the first instruction:

    A person leaves the house by an unfamiliar route. If something
had been left behind, where would you look? Behind?

    He continued his work, and occasionally the sound of the clock came and hurried him in his labors.
    FINALLY, done! A breeze was entering the room through the window and rushing about inside, giving small notice here and there. William would have smiled then, had he been the sort to smile. One envies such types—who do not smile. The rest of us go around like fools, and these few maintain such dignity! Let us never smile again.
    —Molly.
    (She spun around and hopped down from the windowsill.)
    —Here.
    A piece of paper, neatly drafted.

    THE SIXTH THIS & THAT
    by W. for M. late in the day.
    beginning on the table, you should know

    Molly ran to the table and snatched up the paper.
    It read:

    A person leaves the house by an unfamiliar route. If something
had been left behind, where would you look? Behind?

    She began to walk up and down the room, brow bent, hand tapping against the skirt of her dress. All the while her other hand chattered to itself.
    *Aha!
    At the photograph of the bird’s nest,
    she stopped. Reaching up, she lifted the frame. A note on a string dropped down. Out she took it.
    It said:

    If dogs were wild once, then I too am wild. If a rifle
consists of circles within circles, then I too circle. I am an
old measure, made by a king, and when people speak of me,
they have forgotten who I am .

    Molly frowned. She looked around suspiciously.
    *Don’t know about this.
    William took an orange from a basket by the stove, peeled it, and ate a section.
    Molly continued in her suspicion. She did not walk this time, but stood moving her head ever so slightly from right to left.
    *Another clue?
    —How many clues do you need?
    *Seems like one more, doesn’t it?
    William ate another piece of orange.
    Molly sat down and immediately jumped up again. From the back of her shoe, she tore the next note and string.
    *You, you stinker.
    This note said:

    Loons out under indelicate skies abate .

    Molly walked slowly to the windowsill and sat. She held the note up to the light. She turned it upside down. She put the corner in her mouth. She pulled it taut. She tossed it in the air and watched it fall. She picked it up again.
    —It’s a good one, don’t you think?
    *Too hard.
    William shook his head. He thought then of his violin teacher, long dead.
    There was a long oaken drive dancing between the road and the house and the shadows were mad for the trees and the sun and raged there as William ran to the house in those emptied years, summers, mornings, days. It was a hard discipline she had, and she would hurt him awfully, and his parents approved of it all, but she made him feel he was her main work, and raised him above all other things, explaining music to him not in terms of other things, but in their absences, in the places where things meet. A sonata is not the passing of geese, it is not a stream’s noise, not the sound of a nightingale. A violin does not speak, does not chatter. The catastrophe of a symphony’s wild end is not a storm breaking upon land. It is not the shuddering and sundering of a house. But it is in part, she would say, the understanding of these things. You must be brutal, terrible, but with great sympathy, sympathy for all things, and yet no mercy. Was that why the government wanted no