Meantime the procession had reached the main road and before long they were back in the college where all the teachers, headed by the principal, were there to receive the dead Hindlinger who in his lifetime would have run a mile to avoid such an honour. Schoolmasters look at a dead school-boy very differently from the way they regard a living one; they are convinced, for the moment, of the worth and uniqueness of every individual life in their charge and every youthtime against which they sin with such indifference the rest of the time.
But that evening and the whole of the next day the presence of the frail corpse worked like a magic spell, damped down and subdued all activity and conversation so that for a brief interlude all wrangling, anger, noise and laughter were hidden away like water sprites who disappear momentarily from the surface of the water and leave it calm and apparently uninhabited. Whenever two people spoke together of the drowned boy they called him by his full name, for the nickname Hindu did not seem dignified enough now the boy was dead. And the quiet Hindu who had been wont to merge unnoticed into the crowd now filled the whole establishment with his name and his dead presence.
[The Prodigy, Hesse, H.]
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