Page 71 - DENG102_COMMUNICATION_SKILLS_II

Communication Skills-II

notes
Example: Read this story and realize the way in which the writer has build up the story
and used his dialogue writing skills to generate interest among the readers:
A Deal in Ostriches: by HG Wells
A ship was sailing from India to the West Indies and had many important ports on her way.

“Talking of the prices of birds, I’ve seen an ostrich that cost three hundred pounds,” said the Taxidermist,
recalling his youth of travel. “Three hundred pounds!”
He looked at me over his spectacles. “I’ve seen another that was refused at four.”
“No,” he said, “it wasn’t any fancy points. They were just plain ostriches. A little off colour, too–owing to
dietary. And there wasn’t any particular restriction of the demand either. You’d have thought five ostriches
would have ruled cheap on an East Indiaman. But the point was, one of ‘em had swallowed a diamond.

“The chap it got it off was Sir Mohini Padishah, a tremendous swell, a Piccadilly swell you might say up to
the neck of him, and then an ugly black head and a whopping turban, with this diamond in it. The blessed
bird pecked suddenly and had it, and when the chap made a fuss it realised it had done wrong, I suppose,
and went and mixed itself with the others to preserve its incog. It all happened in a minute. I was among
the first to arrive, and there was this heathen going over his gods, and two sailors and the man who had
charge of the birds laughing fit to split. It was a rummy way of losing a jewel, come to think of it. The man
in charge hadn’t been about just at the moment, so that he didn’t know which bird it was. Clean lost, you
see. I didn’t feel half sorry, to tell you the truth. The beggar had been swaggering over his blessed diamond
ever since he came aboard.
“A thing like that goes from stem to stern of a ship in no time. Everyone was talking about it. Padishah
went below to hide his feelings. At dinner, he pigged at a table by himself, him and two other Hindus, the
captain kind of jeered at him about it, and he got very excited. He turned round and talked into my ear.
He would not buy the birds; he would have his diamond. He demanded his rights as a British subject. His
diamond must be found. He was firm upon that. He would appeal to the House of Lords. The man in charge
of the birds was one of those wooden-headed chaps you can’t get a new idea into anyhow. He refused any
proposal to interfere with the birds by way of medicine. His instructions were to feed them so-and-so and
treat them so-and-so, and it was as much as his place was worth not to feed them so-and-so and treat them
so-and-so. Padishah had wanted a stomach-pump—though you can’t do that to a bird, you know. This
Padishah was full of bad law, like most of these blessed Bengalis, and talked of having a lien on the birds,
and so forth. But an old boy, who said his son was a London barrister, argued that what a bird swallowed
became ipso facto part of the bird, and that Padishah’s only remedy lay in an action for damages, and even
then it might be possible to show contributory negligence. He hadn’t any right of way about an ostrich that
didn’t belong to him. That upset Padishah extremely, the more so as most of us expressed an opinion that
was the reasonable view. There wasn’t any lawyer aboard to settle the matter, so we all talked pretty free.
At last, after Aden, it appears that he came round to the general opinion, and went privately to the man in
charge and made an offer for all five ostriches.
“The next morning there was a fine shindy at breakfast. The man hadn’t any authority to deal with the
birds, and nothing on earth would induce him to sell; but it seems he told Padishah that a Eurasian named
Potter had already made him an offer, and on that Padishah denounced Potter before us all. But I think the
most of us thought it rather smart of Potter, and I know that when Potter said that he’d wired at Aden to
London to buy the birds, and would have an answer at Suez, I cursed pretty richly at a lost opportunity.
“At Suez, Padishah gave way to tears—actual wet tears—when Potter became the owner of the birds, and
offered him two hundred and fifty right off for the five, being more than two hundred per cent on what
Potter had given. Potter said he’d be hanged if he parted with a feather of them—that he meant to kill them
off one by one and find the diamond; but afterwards, thinking it over, he relented a little. He was a gambling
hound, was this Potter, a little queer at cards, and this kind of prize-packet business must have suited him
down to the ground. Anyhow, he offered, for a lark, to sell the birds separately to separate people by auction
at a starting price of £80 for a bird. But one of them, he said, he meant to keep for luck.

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