The magician successfully sends the elephant home

The magician’s successful return of the elephant resolves the captivity at the heart of this episode, but it is not a simple undoing: the magician reverses his spell with the knowledge that not everything can be undone. At the Countess Quintet’s Residence, Peter asks for the elephant to be sent home, the magician performs the backward spell, and the elephant disappears. Her departure is witnessed only by Peter, who finds four circular footprints in the snow and hopes that she is home.

Causes and Stakes

The elephant’s captivity had begun in a confusion of law, responsibility, and possession. After she crashed through the roof of the opera house and crippled a noblewoman, Baltese’s chief of police searched his handbook without finding any rule for a beast that had appeared from nowhere and caused such damage. One policeman proposed treating the elephant as a criminal; Leo Matienne challenged that logic by arguing that she had not chosen to crash through the roof and could not fairly be blamed for it. The question of whether she was culpable, however, did not prevent the authorities from determining where she would be kept.

Countess Quintet took possession of the elephant. Since her home had no door large enough for her, the countess hired a dozen craftsmen, who knocked down a wall and installed an enormous decorated entrance in a day. The elephant was brought there under cover of night, escorted by the police chief, and the door was locked behind him. The countess paid the opera-house owner enough to repair the roof many times over and made a generous contribution to the policemen’s fund; the elephant’s fate was consequently placed in her hands. Installed in the ballroom, she became a spectacle for visitors.

That spectacle drew the city into a shared ritual of looking and hoping. On the first Saturday of the month, people queued from the countess’s home down the hill: tradespeople, children, older people, priests, fortunetellers, and citizens in borrowed finery stood together. Each brought private wishes, hopes, and desires, and many secretly expected that merely seeing the elephant might make those hopes come true. The crowd’s longing did not itself release her, but the later gathering around her turns the story’s public fascination into a movement toward her return.

The Appeal and the Spell

By the time the group reached the countess’s home, Peter was carrying Adele, Leo Matienne walked beside him, and Hans Ickman pushed Bettine LaVaughn’s wheelchair. Bartok Whynn, Tomas, Iddo, and Sister Marie followed. The magician was there, and Bettine remained part of the encounter: he apologized, bowed to her, and met her questioning, hopeful gaze. Peter’s appeal was direct and practical. The elephant was cold; she needed to go home, where it was warm. His request shifts attention from the spectacle and ownership surrounding her to her immediate need.

The magician agreed to try. He told everyone to step away, but Peter first rested a hand on the elephant, apologized to her, thanked her for what she had done, and said goodbye. The magician circled her, thinking of the star he had watched from his prison cell, the snow he had wanted to show someone, and Bettine’s face as she looked up at him. These thoughts accompany the spell rather than erase its costs: he knew that even a magician could undo only so much.

He spoke the spell backwards, under his breath, reversing the words as well as the spell itself and hoping it would work. The snow stopped. Sister Marie noticed the sky and pointed upward; the others looked, and even Iddo raised his head. Peter alone kept watching the elephant and the magician circling her. The moment makes the return both a magical act and a test of attention: while the group’s gaze turns toward the sky, Peter remains with the elephant.

Disappearance and Aftermath

The elephant was there, and then she was not. Peter alone saw her leave, making him the only witness to the magician’s greatest trick. Her disappearance was instantaneous and silent. The clouds returned, the stars vanished, and snow began falling again; against the noise with which the elephant had arrived in Baltese, her departure left only the small sound of snow landing.

The empty place was not entirely without evidence. Peter bent down to examine the four circular footprints in the snow and acknowledged that the elephant was truly gone, while hoping she was home. When he looked up, Adele was watching him with astonishment. He answered her with the word home, bringing the event back to the destination that had mattered throughout his appeal.

The group’s response continues the release beyond the elephant’s disappearance. After the magician walked away into the swirling snow, Bettine felt a great weight break free of her and laughed aloud; she gathered Adele into a tight embrace and urged the group inside because the child was cold. Leo agreed. The scene thus closes not with a public display of magic but with changed relations among those left behind: the elephant is no longer confined in the countess’s house, Peter and Adele remain together, and Bettine’s burden lifts as the company turns toward shelter.

Significance

The return reverses the magician’s original act without pretending that reversal can restore every consequence. The elephant’s arrival had disrupted the city loudly and placed her under police authority and private ownership; her departure is quiet, witnessed by one person, and marked by footprints rather than a spectacle. The contrast shifts the emphasis from the city’s desire to see the elephant to Peter’s attention to her need to go home.

The episode also brings the earlier dispute over responsibility into a different resolution. Leo had questioned the idea that the elephant should be treated as a criminal for an act she did not choose. Here, the response is not a legal ruling: Peter asks for her release, and the magician uses magic to send her away. The result restores her freedom, while the snow and the footprints leave the precise mechanics of her destination unseen. The hope that she is home is therefore emotionally affirmed by the disappearance, but not presented as a journey the gathered characters can observe.