The Magic Egg

The Magic Egg by Frank R. Stockton

Herbert Loring, a wealthy club-man of good social standing who has recently returned from a long sojourn in the East, hires the theatre of the Unicorn Club for a private afternoon exhibition and invites about forty carefully chosen friends and acquaintances, excluding anyone he considers likely to be uncritical or unappreciative. The performance opens with a display he calls fireworks from Corea: clusters of colored glass strung on a wire, illuminated from offstage by a lantern and set in motion by cords, producing wheels, sparks, and miniature explosions that hold the audience's rapt, silent attention for over twenty minutes. Late to arrive is Edith Starr, Loring's betrothed of a month, who had been meant to sit in a reserved front seat but stayed home at first with her mother, who had a headache. When her mother falls asleep, Edith comes alone, arriving after the fireworks, and quietly takes a back-row seat behind two large men so as not to be noticed or to disrupt the show. Loring then presents the second part: the "magic egg," which he says is a rare exhibition of East Indian magicians. Using a small pine table, a carved box, a wand, a red bag of grain, an embroidered cloth, and an egg, he narrates a chick hatching, eating, and growing in stages—tapping it with the wand at each step—until it becomes a full-grown, crowing cock that he sets on a chair atop the table. The audience grows wildly excited. He then reverses the process with more taps, shrinking the fowl back down through each stage until it is a chick again, which he places back into the reassembled eggshell, restoring the egg to its original state. The audience bursts into applause, and Loring, delighted, closes the show and goes home believing it a perfect success. That evening Loring visits Edith as usual, and she reveals she was present in the back row. She tells him that everyone leaving the theatre spoke only of the fireworks and never mentioned any egg, chick, or fowl, and that when she watched the second performance herself, she saw none of the things he described—no box, wand, cloth, red bag, chick, or grown fowl—and that the table itself was not the plain pine table he claimed but a polished table on a single post. She says nothing existed on that stage except Loring himself. Loring calmly explains: he is deeply interested in hypnotism, and the entire exhibition was an experiment to see whether he could hypnotize a large, carefully selected audience without their suspecting it. The glittering "fireworks," watched steadily for half an hour, was itself the induction method. Once he judged the audience hypnotized, he tested his success by describing a plain pine table falsely, and only after confirming that all could be made to see it as he described did he proceed confidently with the magic-egg narration—which existed only in their induced perceptions. He admits he intended Edith to be hypnotized too, but says he would have explained everything to her afterward, expecting the disclosure to become a shared, even enjoyable, topic between them. Edith is outraged, declaring that he had no right to rob her of her reason and judgment, to make her a mere tool of his will, or to deceive her senses in a public place without her knowledge or consent. She tells him that the man who did this is not the man she promised herself to, that such a betrayal reveals what he might do to her in other ways in the future, and that he has, in this act, shown her the same false front he has shown her before. She leaves for good, telling him "Good-by," and refuses to speak to him again. Walking home, Loring reflects aloud that this rejection is what came out of the magic egg.

By Frank R. Stockton · First published 1894 · Genre: Fantasy, Science Fiction, Adventure · 7,362 words

First lines

The pretty little theatre attached to the building of the Unicorn Club had been hired for a certain January afternoon by Mr. Herbert Loring, who wished to give therein a somewhat novel performance, to which he had invited a small audience consisting entirely of friends and acquaintances.

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The Magic Egg is listed on Textopian as a short story by Frank R. Stockton, dated 1894 CE.

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fantasy · adventure · magic · mystery · imagination · humor · surrealism · narrative · whimsy · creativity · exploration · transformation

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