It is all very well for writers on etiquette, to tell us what to say when we are introduced (hi ya!), or when we leave our hostess (ciao, and thanks a million, toots!). But what do two strangers say to each other when they find themselves alone together?
You are in an apartment house or a hotel, and, for some reason, you are leaving. You may even have been asked to leave. You come down the hall to the elevator/lift and find a stranger there waiting.
Now, presumably he has rung the bell already. He wouldn’t be just hanging around watching the cars go up and down, unless he were the country bumpkin/village idiot. But you march right up and ring the bell, too.
This distrust between strangers is instinctive. You have a feeling that he might not have pushed the “up” bell. Anyway, you push the bell. Then you stand back and wait.
Naturally, this turns him against you. You have cast aspersions on his bell-pushing abilities. So he, too, steps back, giving you a dirty look. You two pretend that you are very busy with your hair or your tie, or something. It is the zero hour. If you are representatives of the more prominent sexes, the strain is even greater. In fact, for a lady and a gentleman to be placid in this position is well-nigh intolerable, if the lift has a long time to come - which it is.
The time for ice-breaking is right at the start, or not at all. After a 30 seconds’ wait, the breach can never be healed.
Of course, in case of two men, the obvious remark for the one who was there already, is: “I rang it once, you mugg !” To which the equally obvious reply is: “how am I to know? I thought you were the house detective.”
This exchange of courtesies/pleasantries, however, would not clear the situation up at all. Better to say nothing than to start snarling right off the bat. The remark least calculated to end in bloodshed would be: “some service, eh?” with the reply: “I’ll say!”
Then what? You have established contact, and a reasonably friendly one, but where do you go from there? You can’t talk about the weather, as neither one of you knows what the weather is at the moment, being on the way out into it. It is a pretty problem in etiquette, and, so far as I have been able to ascertain, one which has never been dealt with by the experts.
Of course, if noel coward or some other banter weight champion were there to banter his way through the situation, at least one party would come out beaming. A rather smart scene could be worked up between a noel coward character and a Dorothy Parker character meeting at an elevator.
But, with the general run of everyday characters, it is anything but a smart scene. It is what people who speak French call an “impasse”.
Now, since the etiquette experts know so much, why don’t they tackle a problem like this? They always pick things like “how do you do?” (Holding the right hand with thumb up) or “so good of you to ask me” (with fingers crossed). I could think those up myself.
The answer to it all must be that, in the real crises in life, nobody knows what to say, which is why we all look so foolish.