Auctioneering

All this time I had been watching the bidders with immense interest. Human nature is so nonsensical that it entangles even the simplest act in ridiculous complications. Thus, at an auction, the main idea is to bid without seeming to do so, on the grounds that if one is not actually seen bidding, no one will notice that any interest is being taken in the lot, whose evident steady increase in value is then attributed to supernatural causes. At the best auctions everyone sits in their best clothes and never shows the least interest; as if they were in church: only a change from red to amber in one eye indicates that another thousand pounds is going down the drain. But at vulgar, provincial auctions the disguise is more crude. All the dealers, for instance, pretend they are tramps and imbeciles. They lean against bits of furniture with their mouths wide open, their stubbled chins dropped in innocent vacancy. Each cultivates an identity which has no bearing whatever on the matter in hand: like most of the furniture in the auction, it is simply a professional fabrication whose whole aim is to pretend to be what it is not. Thus, one dealer bids by seeming to burst into tears; another one uses his left shoulder, which works up and down like a pump; a third allows a brief convulsion to electrify his frame; a fourth uses nothing but his winged nostrils; a fifth, who learnt to wiggle his ears in boyhood, now finds that each ear is capable of elevating a pound sterling. All these ludicrous tricks, which deceive nobody, are imitated by the general public, much as laymen who have read newspapers and listened to politicians become accustomed to expressing themselves in meaningless terms. My aunts' bidding methods, for example, were totally ridiculous: they twitched and shrugged, made secret, obscene motions with their dirty thumbs, and managed in the twinkling of an eye to run their faces through all the manifold expressions of four men shaving in a hurry.