The Bird by Thomas Burke — Read

It is a tale that they tell softly in Pennyfields, when the curtains are / drawn and the shapes of the night shut out.

Those who held that Captain Chudder, s.s. _Peacock_, owners, Peter / Dubbin & Co., had a devil in him, were justified. But they were nearer / the truth who held that his devil was not within him, but at his side, / perching at his elbow, dropping sardonic utterance in his ear; moving / with him day and night and prompting him-so it was held-to frightful / excesses. His devil wore the shape of a white parrot, a bird of lusty / wings and the cruellest of beaks. There were those who whispered that / the old man had not always been the man that his crew knew him to be: / that he had been a normal, kindly fellow until he acquired his strange / companion from a native dealer in the malevolent Solomons. Certainly his / maniac moods dated from its purchase; and there was truth in the dark / hints of his men that there was something wrong with that damned bird / . a kind of. something you sort of felt when it looked at you or / answered you back. For one thing, it had a diabolical knack of mimicry, / and many a chap would cry: "Yes, George! " or "Right, sir! " in answer to a / commanding voice which chuckled with glee as he came smartly to order. / They invariably referred to it as "that bloody bird," though actually / it had done nothing to merit such opprobrium. When they thought it over / calmly, they could think of no harm that it had done to them: nothing to / arouse such loathing as every man on the boat felt towards it. It was not / spiteful; it was not bad-tempered. Mostly it was in cheery mood and would / chuckle deep in the throat, like the Captain, and echo or answer, quite / pleasantly, such remarks, usually rude, as were addressed to it.