Page:Buddenbrooks vol 1 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0001mann).pdf/289

RV 277 (BUDDENBROOKS) duct herself correctly at the exercises. One morning when there was a strange clergyman stopping with the Buddenbrooks, they were invited to sing to a solemn and devout melody the following words:&mdash;

I am a reprobate,

A warped and hardened sinner;

I gobble evil down

Just like the joint for dinner.

Lord, fling thy cur a bone

Of righteousness to chew

And take my carcass home

To Heaven and to you.

Whereat Frau Grünlich threw down her book and left the room, bursting with suppressed giggles.

But the Frau Consul made more demands upon herself than upon her children. She instituted a Sunday School, and on Sunday afternoon only little board-school pupils rang at the door of the house in Meng Street. Stine Voss, who lived by the city wall, and Mike Stuht from Bell-Founders’ Street, and Fike Snut from the river-bank or Groping Alley, their straw-coloured locks smoothed back with a wet comb, crossed the entry into the garden-room, which for a long time now had not been used as an office, and in which rows of benches had been arranged and Frau Consul Buddenbrook, born Kröger, in a gown of heavy black satin, with her white refined face and still whiter lace cap, sat opposite to them at a little table with a glass of sugar-water and catechized them for an hour.

Also, she founded the “Jerusalem evenings,” which not only Clara and Clothilde but also Tony were obliged to attend, willy-nilly. Once a week they sat at the extension table in the dining-room by the light of lamps and candles. Some twenty ladies, all of an age when it is profitable to begin to look after a good place in heaven, drank tea or bishop, ate delicate sandwiches and puddings, read hymns and sermons aloud to each other, and did embroidery, which at the

RV 277 (277)