Climbing down again from her perch, Fanny went to the back of the car, and, taking from beneath the seat her box of tools, she groped in the hollow under the wood and pulled out an iron bar, stout and slightly bent, with a knob at one end—the handle of the wheel jack.
* * * * *
Far away, in what seemed another world, equally blind, snowy and obscure, but divided from this one by fathoms of frozen water, a car was coming out from Pont-à-Moussons on to the main Nancy road. Its two head-lamps glowed confusedly under the snow that clung to them, and the driver, his thick, blue coat buttoned about his chin, leant forward peering through the open windscreen, stung, blinded, and blinking as the flakes drove in.
The head-lamps swept the road, the range of the beams reaching out and climbing the tree trunks in sheltered spots, or flung back and huddled about the front wheels when a blast of fresh snow was swept in from the open valley on the left.
"We must be getting to Marbashe?"
"Hardly yet, mon capitaine. It was unlucky the brigadier should be at Thionville. I could have mended the spring on the lorry myself, but it wants two men to tow in the car."
"This is Marbache!"
In the shelter of the hamlet the lights leapt forward and struck a handful of houses, thickened and rounded with snow. Almost immediately darkness swallowed them up, and a drift of snow flung up by the wind burst in powder over the bonnet and on to the glass.
"The plain outside. Now we go down a long hill. We turn sharp to the right here."
The car entered a tunnel of skeleton trees through which the flakes drained and flickered, or broke in uneven gusts through the trunks. The left lamp touched a little wooden hut which stood blinkered and deserted. Just beyond it was a sharp turn in the road.