The music stopped. Pansy stopped dancing and swooned in a seductive exhaustion into his big arms.
“Oh—damn—the—pins!” he said, picking each English word with care, while he dragged Pansy closer and sprawled over the cushions. He drank more whisky, and again good humour prevailed, and had Pansy heard the comments that were made about her she would, in spite of her profession, have shrivelled.
Now Tai Fu’s hands became more familiar, and Pansy sportively rebuked him with an assumption of shocked virtue. He messed his fingers in her hair and drew her closer, pricking his arm with every embrace, while she reminded him that if you play with a bee you sometimes find the sting. But he was by now too drunk to feel mere pin-pricks, and he rolled his great carcass about with languid laughter.
Later, he drank more whisky, and then began to look sick. He even excused himself, as feeling faint, and got up. Pansy clung to him.
“Don’t go, old boy. Here—listen—don’t send me away hungry. Aren’t we going to have a little ... love, eh, dearie?”
But he thrust her off. His jaw hung. He looked incipiently bilious. And suddenly he waved the company aside, and they, seeing that the show was at an end, straggled out, noisily and slowly. Pansy moved to him at the last, but it was certain that he was too sick for amusement, and he toddled with a friend to another room.
Pansy, left alone, went down the stairs and out into the clear, cold air and the midnight glitter of Poplar.
Tai Fu died that night of aconite poisoning. However, he had chewed strange leaves and preparations of leaves for so long that no one was much surprised. Certainly Pansy was not. When she heard of it, she murmured, “Oh!” airily, as though to say: “Damn good riddance.”
For when she had undressed in her bedroom, on the night of the feast, she had removed from the belt of her waist a fine needle, which had lain for forty-eight hours in a distillation of aconite.