I have dealt at length with our adventures at Fifth Avenue auction houses when we were amassing the furnishings for our Italian rooms and our Italian hallway. But I forgot to make mention of the many friends we encountered at the salesrooms—people who always before had seemed to us entirely normal, but now were plainly to be recognized for devotees of the same passion for bidding-in which had lain its insidious clutches upon us. I recall one victim in particular, a young woman whom I shall call Maude because that happens to be her name.
Theretofore this Maude lady had impressed mo as being one of the sanest, most competent females of my entire acquaintance—good-looking, witty and with a fine sense of proportion. Yet behold, here she was, balanced on the edge of a folding chair in an overheated, overcrowded room, her eyes feverish with a fanatical light, a printed catalogue clutched in her left hand and her right ready to go up in signal to the hypnotic gentleman on the auctioneer's block. At a glance we knew the symptoms because in them we saw duplicated our own. We knew exactly what ailed her: She was bidding on various articles, not because she particularly wanted them, but because she feared unless she bought them some stranger might.
After the sale had ended and her excitement—and ours—had abated we exchanged confidences touching on our besetting mania.
"Just coming and buying something that I wish afterward I hadn't bought isn't the worst of it," she owned. "That is destructive only to my spending allowance. My chief trouble is that I've gotten so I can't bear to think of spending my afternoons anywhere except at this place or one of the places like it. And if there happen to be two sales going the same day at different shops I'm perfectly miserable. All the time I'm sitting in one I'm distracted by the thought that possibly I'm missing some perfectly wonderful bargain at the other. Sometimes I suspect that my intellect is beginning to give way under the strain, and then again I'm sure I'm on the verge of a nervous breakdown. My husband has his own diagnosis. He says I'm just plain nutty, as he vulgarly expresses it. He has taken to calling me Nutchita, which he says is Spanish for a little nut. You know since Scott came back from South America he just adores to show off the Spanish he learned. He loves to tell how he went to a bull fight down there and saw the gallant mandatory stab the charging parabola to the heart with his shining bolero or whatever you call it.
"He says there is no hope of curing me and he appreciates the fact that teams of horses couldn't drag me away from these auction rooms, but he suggested that maybe we might be saved from spending our last days at the almshouse if before I started out on my mad career each afternoon I'd get somebody to muffle me and tie my arms fast so I couldn't bid on anything. But even if I couldn't speak or gesticulate I could still nod, so I suppose that wouldn't help. Besides, as I said to him, I would probably attract a good deal of attention riding down Fifth Avenue with my hands tied behind my back and a gag in my mouth. But he says he'd much rather I were made conspicuous now than that I should be even more conspicuous later on at a feeble-minded institute; he says they'd probably keep me in a strait-jacket anyhow after I reached the violent stage and that I might as well begin getting used to the feeling now.
"All joking aside, though, I really did have a frightful experience last winter," she continued. "There was a sale of desirable household effects advertised to take place up at Blank's on West Forty-fifth Street and of course I went. I've spent so much of my time at Blank's these last few months I suppose people are beginning to think I live there. Well, anyway, I was one of the first arrivals and just as I got settled the auctioneer put up a basket; a huge, fiat, curious-looking, wickerwork affair, it was. You never in all your life saw such a basket! It was too big for a soiled-clothes hamper and besides wasn't the right shape. And it was too flat to store things in and it didn't have any top on it either. I suppose you would just call it a kind of a basket.
"Well, the man put it up and asked for bids on it, but nobody bid; and then the auctioneer looked right at me in an appealing sort of way—I feel that everybody connected with the shop is an old friend of mine by now, and especially the auctioneer—so when he looked in my direction with that yearning expression in his eye I bid a dollar just to start it off for him. And what do you think? Before you could say scat he'd knocked it down to me for a dollar. I just hate people who catch you up suddenly that way! It discouraged me so that after that the sale was practically spoiled for me. I didn't have the courage to bid on another thing the whole afternoon.
"When the sale was over I went back to the packing room to get a good look at what I'd bought. And, my dear, what do you suppose? I hadn't bought a single basket—that would have been bad enough—but no. I'd bought a job lot, comprising the original basket and its twin sister that was exactly like it, only homelier if anything, and on top of that an enormous square wooden box painted a bright green with a great lock fastening the lid down. That wretch of an auctioneer had deliberately taken a shameful advantage of me. How was I to know I was bidding in a whole wagonload of trash? Obtaining money under false pretenses, that's what I call it.
"Well, I stood aghast—or perhaps I should say I leaned aghast, because the shock was so great I felt I had to prop myself up against something. Why, the box alone must have weighed a hundred and fifty pounds. It didn't seem to be the sort of box you could put anything in either. It wouldn't do for a wood box or a coal box or a dog house or anything. It was just as useless as the baskets were, and they were nothing more nor less than two orders of willow-ware on the half shell. Even if they had been of any earthly use, what could I do with them in the tiny three-room apartment that we were occupying last winter? Isn't it perfectly shameful the way these auction-room people impose on the public? They don't make any exceptions either. Here was I, a regular customer, and just see what they had done to me, all because I'm so good-natured and sympathetic. I declare sometimes I'm ready to take a solemn oath I'll never do another favor for anybody so long as I live. It's the selfish ones who get along in this world!
"Well, when I realized what a scandalous trick had been played on me I was seized with a wild desire to get away. I decided I would try to slip out. But the manager had his eye on me. You know the rule they have: 'Claim all purchases and arrange for their removal before leaving premises, otherwise goods will be stored at owner's risk and cost.' And he called me back and told me my belongings were ready to be taken away and would I kindly get them out of the house at once because they took up so much room. Room? They took up all the room there was. You had to step into one of the baskets to get into the place and climb over the box to get out again.
"I asked him how I was going to get those things up to my address and he suggested a taxi. I told him I would just run out and find a taxi, meaning, of course, to forget to come back. But he told me not to bother because there was a taxi at the door that had been ordered to come for somebody else and then wasn't needed. And before I could think up any other excuse to escape he'd called the taxi driver in. And the taxi man took one look at my collection of junk and then he asked us if we thought he was driving a moving van or a Noah's ark and laughed in a low-bred way and went out.
"At that I had a faint ray of hope that maybe after all I might be saved, because I had made up my mind to tell the manager I would just step outside and arrange to hire a delivery wagon or something, and that would give me a chance to escape; but I think he must have suspected something from my manner because already he was calling in another taxi driver from off the street, and there I was, trapped. And the driver of the second taxi was more accommodating than the other one had been, though goodness knows his goodness of heart was no treat to me. I should have regarded it as a personal kindness on his part if he had behaved as the first driver had done. But no, nothing would do but that he must load that ghastly monstrosity of a box up alongside him on the rack where they carry trunks, and two of the packing-room men tied it on with ropes so it couldn't fall off and get lost. I suppose they thought by that they were doing me a favor! And then I got in the cab feeling like Marie Antoinette on her way to be beheaded, and they piled those two baskets in on top of me and the end of one of them stuck out so far that they couldn't get the door shut but had to leave it open. And then we rode home, only I didn't feel like Marie Antoinette any more; I felt like something that was being delivered in a crate and had come partly undone on the way.
"And when we got up to Eighty-ninth Street that bare-faced robber of a taxicab driver charged me two extra fares—just think of such things being permitted to go on in a city where the police are supposed to protect peopl............