House That Berry Built

by Dornford Yates

  We studied the tracings forthwith…

  It was very clear that the brothers desired the contract. They and their draughtsmen must have worked to all hours to produce plans so clear and so finished in such a short time.

  Finally—

  “Monsieur permits us to visit the site again?”

  “Of course.”

  We all went with them.

  Less than two hours later, Carson had marked with pegs the outline of the foundations of the retaining wall.

  Henri was to return the following afternoon. He had to recruit local labour and obtain official permission to quarry the stone we required. The local labour would be leavened by men from his staff at Pau. The latter would lodge at Lally during the week, and a lorry would take them home on Saturday afternoon. A foreman, whose name was Joseph, would be in charge, and one of the brothers would be there three times a week. The work would actually start in three days’ time – at six in the morning of Thursday, to be precise. But Henri was to see us on Tuesday at five o’clock – to learn our decision regarding the entrance-drive.

  Jonah put it clearly enough – on Monday afternoon.

  “The first thing they’ve got to do is to make a drive into the meadows out of the road. Now the level of the first meadow is six feet above the road at its lowest point. To gain that six feet, or more, they must make a considerable ramp. More. Because the road is so narrow, the entrance itself must be wide: otherwise no big vehicle will be able to get in. Now we don’t want to do more damage than we can help; so the drive which is cut for the lorries which bring the building stuff must be the drive which will afterwards serve the house. We must therefore decide here and now where we want the entrance and how the drive is to run.”

  “Entrance by the ruisseau,” said I.

  “That’s what I think,” said my cousin. “The other end of the field would really be more convenient, for, if we enter by the ruisseau, everything coming from Lally will be faced with a hairpin turn: but the ground at the other end runs into a ridge and to cut a drive out of that would mean easily twice as much work.”

  “What about the middle?” said Jill.

  “That’s out of the question,” said I, “for the middle is where they will work. They must have a clear space there, in which to mix their mortar and shoot their sand and stones. The middle, in fact, will be the builder’s yard. And there they will set up the crane they will have to have.”

  “Did you say a crane?” said Daphne.

  “Of course,” said Jonah. “The platform will be forty feet up – forty feet from the foot of the wall. Say, roughly, seventy feet above the drive. Well, you can’t climb seventy feet with a lot of rocks in your arms.”

  My sister put a hand to her head.

  “I’m beginning to get frightened,” she said. “What have we done?”

  “One minute,” said Berry. “For reasons best known to yourselves, you seem to have decided that the entrance should be by the rill. You’re probably wrong, but I don’t dispute your decision, because I can’t see that it matters the flick of a turkey’s eyelid where we go in. But then you said we must settle how the drive is to run. Well, that’s a very different cup of tea.”

  “I shouldn’t have said that,” said Jonah. “You see, there’s only one way in which the drive can run. And that’s parallel to the road, about twenty feet inside the meadow, which happily, just to begin with, is very nearly flat. You enter by the ruisseau or rill and then drive straight along across the foot of the site. And there’s the garage waiting, right at the other end.”

  “Who cares about the garage?” said Berry. “How will a car proceed from the road to the house?”

  “It won’t,” said I. “It will proceed from the road to the foot of the front-door steps.”

  “Don’t quibble,” said Berry.

  “He isn’t quibbling,” said Jonah. “Just before it enters the garage, a car will pass the foot of the front-door steps. These will debouch upon the apron on which the cars are washed.”

  “But you said just now that the house would be seventy feet above the drive.”

  “About that,” said Jonah.

  Berry looked wildly round.

  “One of us is insane,” he said. “You can’t have a hundred and forty front-door steps.”

  “Thereabouts,” said Jonah. “To take a drive up to the house, we should have to buy two more meadows; and then the drive would cost us five hundred pounds to build. Of course there’ll be two flights of steps, one front and one back.”

  As soon as he could speak—

  “I see,” said Berry. “And suppose you get down to the drive, to find you’ve forgotten your teeth?”

  “You ring up Therèse from the garage and tell her to throw them down.”

  Berry left his seat and took a short walk.

  On his return—

  “What about a lift?” he demanded.

  “Out of the question,” said Jonah.

  “The other day,” said I, “you were all for a flight of steps.”

  “I said a flight,” said Berry. “Not a tread-mill. D’you honestly mean to tell me there’s no way out?”

  “None,” said Jonah. “I thought you realized that. We shall soon get used to them. After all, what are a few steps, if they’re going to lead to a terrace ‘projected into the air’?”

  My brother-in-law swallowed.

  “We’d better,” he said, “we’d better have some quarters by the garage. Nothing much. Just a bedroom and bathroom, you know – in case I feel faint. Oh, and what do we do if it’s raining?”

  “Fairly squirt upstairs,” said I, “and into the porch.”

  “Remove that man,” said Berry, excitedly. “Charge him with obscene libel.” He turned upon Daphne and Jill. “Yes, you can laugh, you sirens. Not a word about steps yesterday. Slush about hanging gardens and terraces in the air. So I signed that blasted contract. Fancy paying five hundred quid to have your guts dragged out every time you come in.”

  “Darling,” said Daphne, “it sounds much worse than it is. Besides, Jonah thinks about a hundred. Not more than that. And you won’t have to run up and down them all day long.”

  “Are you trying to be comforting?” said her husband.

  “Listen,” said I. “It is, of course, inconvenient. You can’t get away from that.”

  “No exaggeration, please,” said Berry.

  “But it is unavoidable, unless, as Jonah says, we like to buy two more fields and then pay out five hundred pounds, half to be spent on labour and half on retaining walls. Which is absurd. But don’t forget that the garden will be on the house-level. The steps will only be used when we want to go out in the car.”

  “Only,” said Berry. “Say twice a day. That’s a hundred and fifty thousand a year. Talk about the blue-based baboons… We’d better call the house ‘The Postman’s Delight’.”

  “Do you agree,” said Jonah, “that the entrance should be by the ruisseau?”

  “Oh, I suppose so,” said Berry. “The bottom’s fallen out of my soul – but what of that?”

  “And the garage the other end?”

  “Provided that it has a retiring-room. I won’t climb a hundred steps every time I want to powder my nose.”

  This remark was very properly ignored.

  Jonah got to his feet.

  “Come on then,” he said. “Let’s go and peg out the entrance, so that there’s no mistake.”

  Berry joined us before we had done.

  “Must they start at cockcrow?” he asked.

  “At six,” I said. “Not cockcrow.”

  “Same thing,” said Berry. “Oh well… But I’m damned if I’ll shave.”

  “Do you mean to be present?” said I.

  “Of course. Am I or am I not the head of the family?”

  “You are.”

  “I should damned well think so,” said Berry. “As such I have my rights. You can keep your hundred steps – and put them where they belong. But my
prerogative remains. No one shall take it from me. Be the hour dawn or dusk, I’m going to turn the first sod.”

  5

  In Which Berry Turns the First Sod,

  and Jonah Tells Falcon His Guess

  In fact, no sod was turned; but a stone was prized out of the wall which kept the soil of the meadow from sliding into the road. The ceremony was duly performed soon after six o’clock on the twenty-third day of July. Joseph subscribed to the rite with great solemnity. Indeed, by his suggestion, we each pulled out one stone, while the workmen looked on. Then we stood away, and the little band fell to work.

  We all took to Joseph at once, and Joseph took to us. He was a small merry-eyed man, wonderfully fit and strong and immensely capable. The men liked, but feared him. He was always first on the scene, and was always the last to leave. He knew his job inside out and could do any artisan’s business rather better than the artisan himself. Certain pieces of work he would let nobody touch: they were for his hand alone. He was never idle. He never stood watching, but worked with his underlings. Yet he had an eye like a hawk, and a man who wasted time disappeared at the end of the week. The summer working-day was ten hours long: Joseph’s was always eleven, and often longer than that. The man had amour propre. More. Never before had those for whom he was building displayed any interest in the work: but we took an intelligent interest in everything that was done. This carried Joseph into the seventh heaven, and he gave us the finest service that ever five people had.

  By Saturday evening, two things had become most clear. The first was how wise we had been to decide that the entrance should be at the western end of the site: the second was that, though the ground there was lower than at the eastern end, the miniature cliff of soil, which, by cutting into the meadow, the men had laid bare, would have to be held. Indeed, this had had to be revetted to allow the work to go on – roughly revetted with timber, to hold the soil back. But this was not too safe, and the struts, of course, diminished the width of the entrance itself: and so, since, sooner or later, a wall would have to be built, the masons were coming on Monday to start the work.

  And there you are.

  Before we could build our house, we had to build a platform on which it could stand: before we could build the platform, we had to build a forty-foot wall to hold the platform in place: and before we could build that wall, we had to build a twelve-foot retaining wall, to make the entrance safe for the lorries to go to and fro.

  That is the price of building upon a mountainside.

  Those first nine days flew by.

  Joseph had set a hand-rail which climbed to our ledge, and that ledge was our battle-headquarters from that time on. There Daphne spent most of her day, and thither we repaired when we could no longer stand up. Jonah and I spent much of our time at the entrance, lending a hand with the mortar or shovelling soil: Carson helped Joseph to build an eyesore hut: and Berry and Jill spent hour after hour at the ruisseau, clearing the brambles that choked it and shoring up its banks where they had given way.

  And then at last the foundations of the great wall were laid: six feet six inches across and ninety-seven feet long – a raft of ferro-concrete, to carry the wall itself. The work was done one Saturday. On the following Monday morning, the wall itself was begun.

  There were now seven masons and thirty-two men in all. The brothers Henri and Jean were determined to waste no time. Two masons were still at work on the little retaining wall at the mouth of the drive. Three lorries were plying all day, bringing now sand, now cement and now the stone from the quarry two crow’s miles off. Three men were working at the quarry, hewing and blasting and breaking from dawn to dusk. The water had been piped from the ruisseau to a spot by Joseph’s hut: Joseph and Carson together had done this job. And a primitive crane had been reared, to hoist giant buckets to a scaffold along which trucks could be pushed to the foot of the great, big wall.

  So for fourteen days…

  Then a proper, steel crane arrived – with an extensible tower, and a man to drive its engine and manage its arm.

  The wall was now twelve feet high and had tapered to five feet thick. Its wings, too, were taking shape…

  In its western wing a doorway was being built – a Norman doorway worthy of the wall and its stone. This would admit to the chamber beneath the platform, and wood and coal and such stores could be brought in by this way. The doorway had been Joseph’s idea.

  And now it was Sunday evening, and all of us, except Jonah, were standing on the site of the drive, gazing up at the wall.

  “How much higher?” said my sister.

  “It’ll be rather more than three times its present height.”

  “Boy!”

  “Plus another three feet six for the parapet.”

  My sister covered her mouth.

  “I feel quite frightened,” she said. “Whatever will everyone say?”

  “I can’t imagine,” I admitted. “I confess there are times when I feel uneasy myself.”

  “The quarry will give out,” said Berry. “There can’t be so much stone.”

  “Plenty of stone,” said I. “Remember Chartres cathedral.”

  “They won’t let us have that,” said Berry. “Destroying ancient monuments.”

  “Fool,” said his wife. “Will the quarry really give out?”

  “I’ll take you there tomorrow,” said I, “and you shall see for yourself what, if I were to tell you now, you would not believe.”

  “I’ll believe you, Boy. Go on.”

  “We seem to have used next to nothing.” That was the truth. “Broken up and set in mortar, a cubic yard of stone goes an absurdly long way.”

  It was a grey-brown stone, very pleasing to look on and very hard. It was, of course, used rough – that is to say, undressed. The effect was admirable. (One ‘girdle’ was already in place. This was not to be seen, for it lay in the heart of the wall and was faced with stone. But it was there all right – girding the wall to the wings and the mountain beyond. ‘Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.’)

  We climbed to the masons’ scaffold and turned to look at the view.

  “And this is nothing,” said Jill. “By the time it’s three times as high…”

  “We shall have to be roped,” said Berry. “It won’t be safe.”

  “With a decent parapet?”

  “Well, a good, strong one. I’m not as young as I look.”

  “With flags on its top,” said Jill. “All nice and warm. D’you think we could get some flags?”

  “I know we can,” said I. “They cut them twenty miles off!”

  “Oh, Boy, it’ll be like England.”

  “That’s the idea, sweetheart.”

  This was most true. One and all, we wanted an English home.

  “There now,” said Daphne. “Tell me. I’ve always forgotten to ask. I really think my brain’s going.”

  “I know it is,” said Berry. “I’m always afraid you’ll lick de Moulin good night.”

  “You filthy beast,” said his wife. “But for heaven’s sake tell me before I forget again. The house itself – the façade – will be twenty-eight metres long. Why then is the terrace thirty? I mean, the terrace will be the length of the wall.”

  “That,” said I, “was Henri and Jean’s idea. And a devilish good one, too. It will give us a way off the terrace on the western side of the house. A step or two down to the garden. So we can reach the terrace from either garden or house.”

  “Brilliant,” said Daphne. “We’d never thought of that. What a mercy they did.”

  “That,” said I, “is the awful part of building. Five times out of six, you think of a thing too late. But Jonah has vision, and Joseph’s a tower of strength.”

  “I warn you,” said Berry, “we shall make some frightful mistakes. Only after we’ve dug the cesspool—”

  “We shan’t if we look ahead.”

  “We’ve made one already,” said Berry.

  “What’s that?” said eve
ryone.

  “This wall won’t be high enough. What’s forty feet? If it was to be ninety feet high, we could call our residence ‘BABEL’ and look the world in the face.”

  Here Jonah appeared.

  “Falcon’s at Pau,” he said. “I’ve just been speaking to him. He’s coming to stay at Lally for two or three days.”

  “You think he’s down here?” said Jonah.

  “In this region,” said Falcon. “Except for one thing, I’ve little enough to go on. But at least he does know this district. They went to Portugal first: then they came up to France by sea: they entered the country at Bayonne and gradually made their way east: so they spent just over two months in the Basses Pyrénées. And that is the only part of the Continent that he does know – except some of Portugal. But I don’t think he’s there, and the French say he hasn’t left France.”

  “‘Except for one thing,’” said Jonah.

  Falcon smiled.

  “My instinct. Officially, that doesn’t count. But it has been right. I have a definite feeling that Tass is somewhere down here.”

  There was a little silence.

  Then—

  “You’re going to look round?” said my cousin.

  “Yes. Shapely told me roughly the way they came, and I shall start from here and cover that ground. Unofficially, of course. Have you ever heard of a place called Luz Ortigue?”

  “I have, but I’ve never been there. You turn to the right after Cluny. There’s no habitation there.”

  “That’s where Tass was dismissed. He walked from there to Cluny to get a bus into Pau.”

  “If you’d like to see it, I’ll take you there tomorrow. I’d like to see it myself.”

  “That’s very kind of you. In my job seeing’s believing. I’d give a great deal to run that fellow to earth.”

  “It was a barbarous crime.”

  “Yes. And very well timed. The man was in Paris before the Yard was informed.”

  “Purchase of the chloroform?” said Jonah.

  “The French say it can’t be traced. That’s likely enough. And it may very well have been purchased in Portugal.”

  “Finger-prints?”