【正文】 []lesson fourteenSaturday Night and Sunday Morningby Alan Sillitoe Text141 He sat by the canal fishing on a Sunday morning in spring, at an elbow where alders dipped over the water like old men on their last legs, pushed by young sturdy oaks from behind. He straightened his back, his fingers freeing nylon line from a speedily revolving reel. Around him lay knapsack and jacket, an empty catchnet, his bicycle, and two tins of worms dug from the plot of garden at home before setting out. Sun was breaking through clouds, releasing a smell of earth to heaven. Birds sang. A soundless and minuscular explosion of water caught his eye. He moved nearer the edge, stood up, and with a vigorous sweep of his arm, cast out the line. 142 Another solitary man was fishing further along the canal, but Arthur knew that they would leave each other in peace, would not even call out greetings . No one bothered you: you were a hunter, a dreamer, your own boss away from it all for a few hours on any day that the weather did not throw down its rain . Like the corporal in the army who said it was marvellous the things you thought about as you sat on the lavatory. Even better than that, it was marvellous the things that came to you in the tranquillity of fishing.143 He drank tea from the flask and ate a cheese sandwich, then sat back to watch the red and white floatup to its waist in water under the alder treesand keep an eye always close to it for the sudden indication of a fortunate catch. For himself, his own catch had been made, and he would have to wrestle with it for the rest of his life. Whenever you caught a fish, the fish caught you, in a way of speaking , and it was .the same with anything else you caught, like the measles or a woman. Everyone in the world was caught, somehow, one way or another, and those that weren39。t were always on the way to it. As soon as you were born you were captured by fresh air that you screamed against the minute you came out . Then you were roped in by a factory, had a machine slung around your neck , and then you were hooked .up by the arse with a wife. Mostly you were like a fish: you swam about with freedom , thinking how good it was to be left alone, doing anything you wanted to do and caring about no one, when suddenly: SPLUTCH!the big hook clapped itself into your mouth and you were caught. Without knowing what you were doing you had chewed off more than you could bite and had to stick with the same piece of bait for the rest of your life . It meant death for a fish。 but for a man it might not be so bad. Maybe it was only the beginning of something better in life, better than you could ever have thought possible before clamping your avid jaws down over the vital bait. Arthur knew he had not yet bitten, that he had really only licked the bait and. found it tasty, that he could still disengage his mouth from the nibbled morsel. But he did not want to do so. If you went through life refusing all the bait dangled before you, that would be no life at all. No changes would be made and you would have nothing to fight against. Life would be as dull as ditchwater. You could kill yourself by too much cunning. Even though bait meant trouble, you could not ignore it for ever. He laughed to think that he was full of bait already, halfdigested slop that had certainly given him a share of trouble, one way or another. 144 Watching the float so intently made him sleepy: he had been with Doreen until two the night before. They spoke of getting married in three months, by which time, Arthur said, they would have collected a good amount of money, nearly a hundred and fifty pounds, not counting inetax rebate, which will probably bump it up to a couple of hundred. So they would be sitting pretty, Doreen replied, because Mrs. Greatton had already offered to let them stay with her for as long as they liked, paying half the rent. For she would be lonely when Chumley left. Arthur said he would be able to get on with Mrs. Greatton , because living there he would be the man of the house. And if there was any argument, they could get rooms somewhere. So it looked as though they39。d be all right together, he thought, as long as a war didn39。t start, or trade slump and bring back the dole. As long as there wasn39。t a famine, a plague to sweep over England, an earthquake to crack it in two and collapse the city around them, or a bomb to drop and end the world with a big bang. But you couldn39。t concern yourself too much with these things if you had plans and wanted to get something out of life that you had never had before. And that was a fact, he thought, chewing a piece of grass.145 He fixed the rod firmly against the bank and stood to stretch himself. He yawned widely, felt his legs weaken, then strengthen, then relax, his tall figure marked against a background of curving canal and hedges and trees bordering it. He rubbed his hand over the rough features of his face , upwards over thick lips, grey eyes, low forehead ,short fair hair, then looked up at the mixture of grey cloud and blue patches of sky overhead . For some reason he smiled at what he saw, and turned to walk some yards along the towpath. 　　　Forgetting the stilled float in the water, he stopped to urinate against the bushes. While fastening his trousers, he saw the float in violent agitation, as if it were suddenly alive and wanted to leap out of the water,146 He ran back to the rod and began winding in the reel with steady movements . His hands worked smoothly and the line came in so quickly that it did not seem to be moving except on the reel itself where the nylon thread grew in thickness and breadth, where he evened it out with his thumb so that it would not clog at a vital moment . The fish came out of the water, flashing and struggling on the end of the line, and he grasped it firmly in his hand to take the hook from its mouth. He looked into its glassgrey eye, at the brown pupil whose fear expressed all the