It was a wretched neighbourhood, one of those which reminds one of the life of an animal undergoing a metamorphosis.  Once it had evidently been a rather nice residential section.  The movement of population uptown had left it stranded to the real estate speculators, less desirable to live in, but more valuable for the future.  The moving in of anyone who could be got to live there had led to rapid deterioration and a mixed population of whites and negroes against the day when the upward sweep of business should bring the final transformation into office and loft buildings.  But for the present it was decaying, out of repair, a mass of cheap rooming-houses, tenements, and mixed races.

The joint into which Harris had gone was the only evidence of anything like prosperity on the block, and that evidence was confined to the two entrances on the street, one leading into the ground floor and the other down a flight of steps to the basement.

“Do you want to go in?” asked Kennedy in a tone that indicated that he himself was going.

Just then a negro, dazzling in the whiteness of his collar and the brilliancy of his checked suit, came up the stairs accompanied by a light mulatto.

“It’s a black and tan joint,” Craig went on, “at least downstairs--negro cabaret, and all that sort of thing.”

“I’m game,” I replied.

We stumbled down the worn steps, past a swinging door near which stood the proprietor with a careful eye on arrivals and departures.  The place was deceiving from the outside.  It really extended through two houses, and even at this early hour it was fairly crowded.

There were negroes of all degrees of shading, down to those who were almost white.  Scattered about at the various tables were perhaps half a dozen white women, tawdry imitations of the faster set at the Futurist which we had just left, the leftovers of a previous generation in the Tenderloin.  There was also a fair sprinkling of white men, equally degraded.  White men and coloured women, white women and coloured men, chatted here and there, but for the most part the habitues were negroes.  At any rate the levelling down seemed to have produced something like an equality of races in viciousness.

As we sat down at a table, Kennedy remarked:  “They used to drift down to Chinatown, a good many of these relics.  You used to see them in the old ‘suicide halls’ of the Bowery, too.  But that is all passing away now.  Reform and agitation have closed up those old dives.  Now they try to veneer it over with electric lights and bright varnish, but I suppose it comes to the same thing.  After they are cast off Broadway, the next step lower is the black and tan joint.  After that it is suicide, unless it is death.”

“I don’t think this is any improvement over the—­the bad old days,” I ventured.

Kennedy shook his head in agreement.  “There’s Harris, down there in the back, talking to someone, a white man, alone.”