It is of no small psychological interest to know that the father of Gertrude Gault was the human wolf known to all Glasgow as the Razor King and that one of her earliest adult impressions was of the mortal battle fought between this man and his own son, Johnnie, Gertrude's brother, in a Gorbals street. Who knows? Perhaps only such a brutal tribe of men could have produced a woman with such an infinite longing to be a victim.
The rest of the narrative is written almost entirely by the protagonist herself, and for that reason it is truly Carmencita's book. The editorial work I dedicate with reverence to her agony.
Nineteen-Sixteen
The red disc of sun seemed to be suspended at no great height above the roofs in a thin, whitish-yellow atmosphere. No heat came from it. It was more like the sun on a primitive stage-set, a Chinese lantern, perfectly circular, and with no density. It was sill early and the city would have been silent had it not been for an occasional milk cart, its bottles clinking in their metal-strutted boxes, some early tramcars, and the gradually increasing clamor of the church bells.
It was a Sunday morning in January and the winter-blackened trees on Glasgow Green and in other parks of the city were gaunt and lifeless. There was as yet no sign that in a few weeks, a month at most, the sap would begin to stir in them again. In the early morning frost their trunks had the hard glint of cast iron.
With the disappearance of the January snow, the city had assumed its accustomed grayness, and now under the pale yellow sky and the heatless lens of sun, the streets of tenements on either side of the turgid, scum-laden river were almost deserted. Their heavy emptiness, caused in part by the time of the year, the earliness of the hour, and the fact that it was the morning after the Saturday night before, was accentuated by the preponderance of gray stone, quarried locally, which went to their building.