Maud felt awkward. Desperate for something to say, she pointed to The Times. “Do you think it’s true that Serbia has called up seventy thousand reservists?”
“I doubt if they have seventy thousand reservists,” Walter said gravely. “But they are trying to raise the stakes. They hope that the danger of a wider war will make Austria cautious.”
“Why is it taking the Austrians so long to send their demands to the Serbian government?”
“Officially, they want to get the harvest in before doing anything which might require them to call men to the army. Unofficially, they know that the president of France and his foreign minister happen to be in Russia, which makes it dangerously easy for the two allies to agree on a concerted response. There will be no Austrian note until President Poincare leaves St. Petersburg.”
He was such a clear thinker, Maud reflected. She loved that about him.
His reserve failed him suddenly. His mask of formal courtesy fell away, and his face looked anguished. Abruptly, he said: “Please come back to me.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but her throat seemed choked with emotion, and no words came out.
He said miserably: “I know you threw me over for my own sake, but it won’t work. I love you too much.”
Maud found words. “But your father… ”
“He must work out his own destiny. I cannot obey him, not in this.” His voice sank to a whisper. “I cannot bear to lose you.”
“He might be right: perhaps a German diplomat can’t have an English wife, at least not now.”
“Then I’ll follow another career. But I could never find another you.”
Her resolve melted and her eyes flooded.
He reached across the table and took her hand. “May I speak to your brother?”
She bunched up her white linen napkin and blotted her tears. “Don’t talk to Fitz yet,” she said. “Wait a few days, until the Serbian crisis blows over.”
“That may take more than a few days.”
“In that case, we’ll think again.”
“I shall do as you wish, of course.”
“I love you, Walter. Whatever happens, I want to be your wife.”
He kissed her hand. “Thank you,” he said solemnly. “You have made me very happy.”
A strained silence descended on the house in Wellington Row. Mam made dinner, and Da and Billy and Gramper ate it, but no one said much. Billy was eaten up with a rage he could not express. In the afternoon he climbed the mountainside and walked for miles on his own.
Next morning he found his mind returning again and again to the story of Jesus and the woman taken in adultery. Sitting in the kitchen in his Sunday clothes, waiting to go with his parents and Gramper to the Bethesda Chapel for the service of the breaking of bread, he opened his Bible at the Gospel According to John and found chapter 8. He read the story over and over. It seemed to be about exactly the kind of crisis that had struck his family.
He continued to think of it in chapel. He looked around the room at his friends and neighbors: Mrs. Dai Ponies, John Jones the Shop, Mrs. Ponti and her two big sons, Suet Hewitt… They all knew that Ethel had left Ty Gwyn yesterday and bought a train ticket to Paddington; and although they did not know why, they could guess. In their minds, they were already judging her. But Jesus was not.
During the hymns and extempore prayers, he decided that the Holy Spirit was leading him to read those verses out. Toward the end of the hour he stood up and opened his Bible.
There was a little murmur of surprise. He was a bit young to be leading the congregation. Still, there was no age limit: the Holy Spirit could move anyone.
“A few verses from John’s Gospel,” he said. There was a slight shake in his voice, and he tried to steady it.
“‘They say unto him: Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.’”
Bethesda Chapel went suddenly quiet: no one fidgeted, whispered, or coughed.
Billy read on: “‘Now Moses in the Law commanded us that such should be stoned, but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as if he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted himself up, and said unto them-’”
Here Billy paused and looked up.
With careful emphasis he said: “‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.’”
Every face in the room stared back at him. No one moved.
Billy resumed: “‘And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had lifted himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her: Woman, where are those thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee? She said: No man, Lord.’”
Billy looked up from the book. He did not need to read the last verse: he knew it by heart. He looked at his father’s stony face and spoke very slowly. “‘And Jesus said unto her: Neither do I condemn thee. Go, and sin no more.’”
After a long moment he closed the Bible with a clap that sounded like thunder in the silence. “This is the Word of God,” he said.
He did not sit down. Instead he walked to the exit. The congregation stared, rapt. He opened the big wooden door and walked out.
He never went back.
CHAPTER NINE – Late July 1914
Walter von Ulrich could not play ragtime.
He could play the tunes, which were simple. He could play the distinctive chords, which often used the interval of the flatted seventh. And he could play both together-but it did not sound like ragtime. The rhythm eluded him. His effort was more like something you might hear from a band in a Berlin park. For one who could play Beethoven sonatas effortlessly, this was frustrating.
Maud had tried to teach him, that Saturday morning at Ty Gwyn, at the upright Bechstein among the potted palms in the small drawing room, with the summer sun coming through the tall windows. They had sat hip to hip on the piano stool, their arms interlaced, and Maud had laughed at his efforts. It had been a moment of golden happiness.
His mood had darkened when she explained how his father had talked her into breaking with Walter. If he had seen his father on the evening when he returned to London, there would have been an explosion. But Otto had left for Vienna, and Walter had had to swallow his rage. He had not seen his father since.
He had agreed to Maud’s proposal that they should keep their engagement secret until the Balkan crisis was over. It was still going on, though things had calmed down. Almost four weeks had passed since the assassination in Sarajevo, but the Austrian emperor still had not sent to the Serbians the note he had been mulling so long. The delay encouraged Walter to hope that tempers had cooled and moderate counsels had prevailed in Vienna.
Sitting at the baby grand piano in the compact drawing room of his bachelor flat in Piccadilly, he reflected that there was much the Austrians could do, short of war, to punish Serbia and soothe their wounded pride. For example, they could force the Serbian government to close anti-Austrian newspapers, and purge nationalists from the Serbian army and civil service. The Serbians could submit to that: it would be humiliating, but better than a war they could not win.
Then the leaders of the great European countries could relax and concentrate on their domestic problems. The Russians could crush their general strike, the English could pacify the mutinous Irish Protestants, and the French
