Country Lawyer and Other Stories for the Screen by William Faulkner

Author:William Faulkner [Faulkner, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary
ISBN: 9780878053087
Google: 3y0MAAAAIAAJ
Amazon: 0878053085
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: 1987-06-15T05:00:00+00:00

THE END

The Life and Death of a Bomber

(It arrived too late, and so died.)

ACT I

It is going to be too late.

(This should not happen)

Smith is an Air Force officer, a civilian engineer and an army-trained pilot, who has been assigned to a bomber factory to observe the assembling and conduct the final testing of a new bomber. He is a civilian, who has become a soldier only in his country’s hours of need.

After reaching the city, and before reponing to the factory, he meets a strange young woman. They are attracted to each other immediately. He realizes that the woman likes him, but she is trying to brush him off and escape. He does not know why. He holds her only long enough to learn that she is married, her husband is a bomber-factory foreman, and that she works too. He takes this to mean she is a secretary or something of that nature. But she escapes from him before he can learn any more.

Smith reports to the factory. Because of his civilian avocation, he has not only a pilot’s but an engineer’s interest and understanding of what the factory is doing. The bomber is a new series, first production job, which if successful will be the forerunner of fleets of new and efficient bombers which will shorten and end the war and so save the lives of many American troops. The entire factory has concentrated on this one bomber; managers, superintendents, shop foremen and workmen, to produce it as efficiently and as quickly as possible, to turn out the best bomber yet. A deadline has been set for its completion and everyone in the plant has an interest and a part in the job.

Smith is conducted on a preliminary trip to follow the bomber’s evolution from a blueprint to the finished airplane ready to fly. As he follows his guides, he recognizes in one of the assembly lines the young woman he met this morning. She recognizes him, too. When they look at each other this time, it seems to Smith that an electric shock passed between them. He believes she felt it, too. He did not know where she worked, but he realizes now that she must have known all the time where he was going and that they would meet again. She could have avoided seeing him again by quitting her job, yet she didn’t. That she did not, that she should be working in the very factory to which he has been assigned by war orders, seems to him a notification from fate that they are to change each other’s life, and that she must know this and accept it, too. He goes on, listening to his guides.

He completes this first inspection tour. By indirect inquiry he learns when the shifts will change and how to see the woman; he may even learn here who she is, who her husband is. He waits for her. She is not surprised. She expected it. She still resists, even though she knows there is something here she can’t escape and doesn’t want to.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.