24 
Heart of a Giant

A silence fell through the large room. For a few moments the only sounds heard were the crackling of the fire and an occasional chink of cup or saucer from the kitchen. At last Sister Marjolaine began to speak again, though in a more thoughtful and subdued voice than before.

“You may have noticed, Amanda,” she said at length, “that I am quite small.”

“You are . . . shorter than average, I suppose,” said Amanda. “I thought no more about it than how tall I am, or any of the others. Everyone’s different.”

“Exactly,” replied Marjolaine. “It is no more important than that I have brown hair. But when I was young I considered my shortness a defect. From my earliest memory I thought there was something wrong with me.”

“Oh, but I think it’s delightful,” said Amanda. “You are very pretty.”

Sister Marjolaine smiled. “Thank you. I am very thankful for my stature now. But as a child that was certainly not how I felt. You see I came from a family of four boys and two girls. All my brothers are great towering men, as is my father. My sister is of more modest height, though of course she stands a head above me, and my mother is large. So what was I to think when I was young except that I was odd, out of step, the black sheep, the ugly duckling? In fact, I was so tiny as a child that for many years my parents actually considered that perhaps I was a dwarf or midget, though I had none of the other physical manifestations.”

She paused briefly as Sister Hope set a pot of fresh tea on the table in front of the fireplace, then returned to the kitchen for another.

“My father was not a mean man,” Sister Marjolaine continued, “but he had little use for me. I was an oddity. He had his sons to occupy him. I suppose my mother loved me, yet I knew I was odd in her eyes too. So it could not be helped that I thought of myself almost as not one of the family like the rest. Later, I wondered if I had been adopted and they hadn’t told me—adopted, perhaps, from a band of gypsy dwarfs passing through our village. Yet even if that were true, it didn’t stop me from thinking of myself as a mistake on the human family tree, an evolutionary blunder. I don’t know whether you believe in evolution, Amanda. Actually, I don’t know whether I believe in it myself! But if you subscribe to such a theory, that explains how I saw myself—as an evolutionary mistake.

“For one who is not tiny, it is impossible to describe how shortness affects every aspect of life. People cast you odd looks. In a crowd you can see almost nothing. Everyone looks down to talk to you. Shelves are too high. You must crane your neck up to talk to people. You are out of step with everything in life. It never dawned on me that God might have made me the way I am intentionally. Had someone told me such a thing, I would have laughed in their very face. Nor did I yet know that everyone has something about which they feel exactly as I felt about my shortness, something they do not like about how they look, something they would change if they could. I would learn these truths eventually, of course. And how I began to learn them was through books.”

Sister Hope appeared again, this time with a second pot of steaming tea, and the story was interrupted once more for a few minutes.

“I always loved books,” Marjolaine began again after fresh tea was poured. “I dreamed and imagined myself in the stories I read. But as I grew older, I found that I began to grow from them as well.”

“Grow . . . how do you mean?” asked Amanda.

“At first I read just for fun, to escape to faraway places and forget my own miseries for a while. When I was a little girl, books helped me pretend I was someone else. In my dream world I could be happy when reading and forget that tiny little Marjolaine Hedvige was funny looking—a mistake that no one could possibly care about.

“Then came a moment of great revelation, a moment that changed my whole life. I was fifteen at the time and was going through a book of fairy tales. The story I was reading in the book was not exactly a fairy tale, because it was about a young man, French as am I, from a village in the French Alps not so very far from my own hometown. There were no fairies in the story, though perhaps it was a fairy tale after all, because there was a very mean and terrible dragon.”

“Tell us the story!” said Sister Anika.

“You have all heard it before!” laughed Marjolaine.

“I haven’t,” said Amanda.

“Perhaps I shall tell it again on one of our reading nights, then. But it must be dark and stormy.”

“Yes, yes!” clamored the others. “You have never heard a scary story like Sister Marjolaine can tell it on a stormy night.”

“This night is much too calm for a tale like that!” said Marjolaine. “And I mustn’t lose my point. I am telling Amanda my story, not the tale of Michel Archenbaud.”

“Promise that I shall hear it, then,” said Amanda.

“I promise. But back to the heroine of tonight’s story—which is me.” The most delightful giggle erupted out of Marjolaine’s mouth as she said the words.

“So I was reading the story of Michel and the dragon,” she continued. “I suppose to tell you my story I shall have to tell you a little of Michel’s story too. And that is just this—Michel had to save the entire valley from the dragon’s wrath because, like all dragons, this particular one was terrible and ugly and wicked. I don’t know why there aren’t nice dragons in stories from time to time. Perhaps I shall have to write a fairy tale about a nice dragon. But in any case, the dragon bothering Michel’s village was a normal and very wicked creature.

“Finally the dragon was about to swoop down and breathe his fire on every house and destroy them all and leave the whole village in ruins when Michel Archenbaud strode up to the dragon’s lair on the mountain, drew out his sword, stood in the mouth of the cave, and shouted into the blackness.

“‘I can feel your evil breath, Dragon!’ Michel cried out. ‘I know you are in there. Come out and prove you are no coward, for today I shall kill you!’

“Before long Michel heard puffs of fire and the tromping of steps from inside the cave. Slowly they came closer and closer. Gradually he felt warmth breezing toward him, not a pleasant warmth as from a cheery fire inside a cottage, but a noxious warmth, and he knew he was smelling the dragon’s foul, fiery breath. At length he saw the dragon’s two glowing eyes gleaming out of the blackness.

“‘What feeble squeak did I hear!’ hissed the dragon. ‘Did some little mouse dare threaten me?’

“‘You heard the voice of Michel Archenbaud say he was about to kill you!’ shouted Michel into the dragon’s face.

“‘You!’ taunted the dragon, clomping forward another few steps. The end of his green nose now became visible. Out of its two wide black nostrils puffed grey smoke. ‘You are the tiniest man I have ever seen. You are smaller than the boys in your village. You are a mere dwarf. You could not kill a fly!’

“A great roar sounded from the dragon’s mouth at these last words. Hot flames spewed out of his nostrils like red waves of water, swirling about the cave and out toward the entrance. They singed Michel’s feet. But he bravely stood fast.

“‘Perhaps I am tiny,’ he replied. ‘But inside my chest I have the heart of a giant because I believe in myself. And inside my head I have the brain of wisdom because I have read the books of a hundred learned men. But you, Dragon, have a heart of stone and a brain the size of a pea. And it is with my heart and my brain that I shall defeat you, not my height. Your size may be fifty times mine, but my sword shall plunge through your wicked skin because my heart and my brain are greater than you.’”

“What happened next?” Amanda asked.

“Michel killed the dragon and saved the village,” replied Marjolaine. “That’s what happened in the story of Michel Archenbaud.”

There was a short pause. Everyone was quiet. A brief gust of wind blew against the window. Amanda shivered but waited, engrossed, for Sister Marjolaine to go on.

“In my story, something else happened,” she said. “You see, all the time I had been reading, in my imagination I had pictured Michel as a great warrior, as the tallest man in his village. Never in my wildest thoughts did I think he could be a short man . . . like me. When I read those startling words You are the tiniest man I have ever seen, I was so shocked I could not believe my eyes. I had to read them over and over again. The hero, the warrior, the dragon-slayer—a tiny little man, the village dwarf. And when the next words came . . . it is with my heart and my brain that I shall defeat you . . . I felt a great gong explode inside me. It was an instant when all of life changed for tiny little Marjolaine Hedvige.”

Again she paused thoughtfully.

“Suddenly I realized that perhaps I could defeat my own dragon too. My dragon didn’t breathe smoke and fire. But he lived deep in a dark place just like the dragon of the tale—the cave of my very own heart.”

“What was your dragon?” asked Amanda.

“My dragon was my own doubts and fears, and feeling that I was a mistake. Suddenly I thought that perhaps I might slay those doubts too, with my heart and with my brain! Why could I not have the heart of a giant, just like Michel Archenbaud? I too had read books. Why could I not have the brain of learned men?

“I did not, at fifteen years of age, suddenly become brave and courageous and strong like Michel. But I began to grow, because I determined to believe in myself as he did. I knew there had been a change. I slowly began to believe in myself, because I saw that I could stand taller on the inside than I may have looked on the outside, just like brave little Michel of the fairy tale. I saw that my heart and my brain could soar with the birds, could climb the high mountain peaks, could dare open dark caves within myself, could imagine and dream high things, and think lofty thoughts. I saw that my thoughts and imagination could be tall. And that was a greater kind of tallness than how big my body was. Who wouldn’t rather be an imaginative, tall-thinking, happy tiny person than a dull-witted, clumsy, unthinking giant?”

A few of the sisters chuckled. Sister Marjolaine went on.

“During the next years my reading changed. I wanted to grow and learn—to stretch my brain and heart, so that I could get taller and taller. Taller inside . . . taller in my thoughts, in my imagination. And I began to feel taller too—inside, I mean. Gradually I began to see that people around me every day, whose bodies were taller than mine, were not as tall as I was on the inside, because they had not explored mountain regions of thinking and imagination. They had not read the books of a hundred learned men. They had let themselves become content with their own tiny brains, and thus those brains did not grow and stretch and expand and become taller. Strange as it may seem to say, I began to feel sorry for those I met who were not reading and growing and learning and stretching, who were not taking their hearts and brains on journeys to the high places that minds and hearts are meant to explore.

“And finally, my dear Amanda, would you like to know the miracle that happened?” Marjolaine asked.

“Yes, yes, I would,” replied Amanda. She had been sitting on the edge of her seat listening attentively, as had all the others. Sister Marjolaine was indeed a wonderful storyteller.

“I woke up one day to realize that the most astonishing change had taken place. I suddenly realized that I was thankful for my size.

“You can imagine how shocked I was. I could not believe it! Happy . . . me? Because I was tiny!”

Just to hear her tell it so exuberantly made all the sisters smile as they listened.

“Then I began to laugh!” Marjolaine went on, giggling as she spoke. “And I laughed with pure joy and happiness for several minutes because I realized I was truly happy that I was small—physically small, I mean. I would not have traded sizes with anyone. It was my stature that caused me to read in the way I did. It was my shortness that helped me see that bigness of heart and tallness of brain are so much more important. Had I not been tiny, I might never have discovered these things. You cannot imagine how much I now treasure the words ‘In my weakness I am strong.’”

“But that still doesn’t tell Amanda how you began our literary evenings,” laughed Sister Hope.

Marjolaine’s face fell playfully, and she tried to frown. “I do turn everything into a story, don’t I? Shame on me! Then I shall try to finish quickly.

“I have continued to read all my life,” she went on. “Books are so very special to me. Every book I read, every character I meet, I grow and learn from. I love to meet new people in books. They make me think and learn. For you see, I am still trying to grow taller inside, with that part of me that thinks and imagines and dreams and loves. That part of me I hope will keep growing taller and taller to all eternity.

“Naturally I want to share my love for books and characters and growth and getting taller and the imagination of a hundred learned men with my friends. So when I came to the chalet, I asked Sister Hope if I could read a book aloud one evening a week. That was more than ten years ago. Now we do it twice a week, and sometimes in wintertime even more often. I think we have all learned to climb a little higher on our heart-mountains together. Books and stories and characters help us look inside ourselves. They help us decide the kind of people we want to be, and how tall we want to become.”

She fell silent. Sister Regina now spoke up. “When I first made Malcolm’s acquaintance,” she said, “about whom we have recently been reading, you cannot imagine the impact it had on me, just as little Michel Archenbaud did for Sister Marjolaine.”

“In what way?” Amanda asked.

“I wanted to be like him,” Regina replied.

“But he is a man.”

“So was Michel Archenbaud,” said Marjolaine. “But from him I learned about big hearts and tall brains.”

“I want to be like Malcolm in character,” Regina added.

“Men of character are equally good role models for women as are women of character,” said Marjolaine.

“Who else do we try to pattern our lives after than the Lord Jesus, the perfect man?” added Gretchen.

Again silence fell. A few yawns went around the room, indicating that the pleasant evening was nearly at its end and that cozy feather beds were calling out to their owners.

“Unless I am mistaken,” said Sister Hope, “the temperature has been falling as we’ve been sitting here.”

Gretchen leapt up from her chair and ran to the front door. She opened it to the night.

“It’s snowing!” she exclaimed.