I got the best of him only once.I prepared myself.I wrote out a passage from Shakespeare--it may have been the very one I quoted a while ago,I don't remember--and riddled it with his wild steamboatful interlardings.When an unrisky opportunity offered,one lovely summer day,when we had sounded and buoyed a tangled patch of crossings known as Hell's Half Acre,and were aboard again and he had sneaked the Pennsylvania triumphantly through it without once scraping sand,and the A.T.Lacey had followed in our wake and got stuck,and he was feeling good,I showed it to him.It amused him.I asked him to fire it off:read it;read it,Idiplomatically added,as only he could read dramatic poetry.The compliment touched him where he lived.He did read it;read it with surpassing fire and spirit;read it as it will never be read again;for HE knew how to put the right music into those thunderous interlardings and make them seem a part of the text,make them sound as if they were bursting from Shakespeare's own soul,each one of them a golden inspiration and not to be left out without damage to the massed and magnificent whole.
I waited a week,to let the incident fade;waited longer;waited until he brought up for reasonings and vituperation my pet position,my pet argument,the one which I was fondest of,the one which I prized far above all others in my ammunition-wagon,to wit:that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare's works,for the reason that the man who wrote them was limitlessly familiar with the laws,and the law-courts,and law-proceedings,and lawyer-talk,and lawyer-ways--and if Shakespeare was possessed of the infinitely-divided star-dust that constituted this vast wealth,how did he get it,and WHERE,and WHEN?
"From books."
From books!That was always the idea.I answered as my readings of the champions of my side of the great controversy had taught me to answer:that a man can't handle glibly and easily and comfortably and successfully the argot of a trade at which he has not personally served.He will make mistakes;he will not,and cannot,get the trade-phrasings precisely and exactly right;and the moment he departs,by even a shade,from a common trade-form,the reader who has served that trade will know the writer HASN'T.
Ealer would not be convinced;he said a man could learn how to correctly handle the subtleties and mysteries and free-masonries of any trade by careful reading and studying.But when I got him to read again the passage from Shakespeare with the interlardings,he perceived,himself,that books couldn't teach a student a bewildering multitude of pilot-phrases so thoroughly and perfectly that he could talk them off in book and play or conversation and make no mistake that a pilot would not immediately discover.It was a triumph for me.He was silent awhile,and I knew what was happening:he was losing his temper.And I knew he would presently close the session with the same old argument that was always his stay and his support in time of need;the same old argument,the one I couldn't answer--because I dasn't:the argument that I was an ass,and better shut up.He delivered it,and I obeyed.
Oh,dear,how long ago it was--how pathetically long ago!And here am I,old,forsaken,forlorn and alone,arranging to get that argument out of somebody again.
When a man has a passion for Shakespeare,it goes without saying that he keeps company with other standard authors.Ealer always had several high-class books in the pilot-house,and he read the same ones over and over again,and did not care to change to newer and fresher ones.He played well on the flute,and greatly enjoyed hearing himself play.So did I.He had a notion that a flute would keep its health better if you took it apart when it was not standing a watch;and so,when it was not on duty it took its rest,disjointed,on the compass-shelf under the breast-board.When the Pennsylvania blew up and became a drifting rack-heap freighted with wounded and dying poor souls (my young brother Henry among them),pilot Brown had the watch below,and was probably asleep and never knew what killed him;but Ealer escaped unhurt.He and his pilot-house were shot up into the air;then they fell,and Ealer sank through the ragged cavern where the hurricane deck and the boiler deck had been,and landed in a nest of ruins on the main deck,on top of one of the unexploded boilers,where he lay prone in a fog of scalding and deadly steam.But not for long.He did not lose his head:long familiarity with danger had taught him to keep it,in any and all emergencies.He held his coat-lappels to his nose with one hand,to keep out the steam,and scrabbled around with the other till he found the joints of his flute,then he is took measures to save himself alive,and was successful.I was not on board.I had been put ashore in New Orleans by Captain Klinefelter.The reason--however,I have told all about it in the book called Old Times on the Mississippi,and it isn't important anyway,it is so long ago.
