And Miss Cooke will play a Chopin ballade for you and talk to you with the same lightness, deftness, and fun that Bambi displays. She has forgotten more about the art of talking than the authors of all the conversation books ever knew. She is not obtrusive. The manuscript of her happiest book came to the publishers quite unheralded—just a manuscript in a cardboard box with a note from Miss Cooke saying she would like to have Doubleday, Page & Company consider it. Eugene F. Saxton began it one Sunday afternoon about 5 o’clock, intending to read until six, then go for a walk and have dinner uptown somewhere. He read till seven, looked at the clock, and—went on reading. You can eat any day, you know....
Later a telegram went forth: “Bambi is ours. Love at first sight.”
Miss Cooke sat to Mary Green Blumenschein for the illustrations to her book; that’s why they are what they ought to be. And you are to picture her just as you would picture Bambi, say as sitting on a low couch, her feet tucked in, enthroned among billowy cushions, that is, of course, if you, the caller, are really acquainted. It will be sufficient to be acquainted with Bambi when you call.
What else? Bambi was followed by Cinderella Jane and that interesting tale of the studio cleaner who was married to the painter without love on either side—they made a success of it and were rewarded by becoming lovers—that tale was succeeded by The Threshold, in which Miss Cooke chose a theme which would give full and legitimate play to her interest in social problems. A rich bachelor, Gregory Farwell, employs Joan Babcock as housekeeper and companion for himself and his 17-year-old nephew. Farwell’s employees strike; the nephew, inspired by Joan, takes the workers’ side. The result is a thoroughly dramatic story in which the problems of capital and labor, social relations and the like arise fairly and squarely out of the action and are not foisted on the reader. Miss Cooke manages exceedingly difficult material well.
If you go to interview Miss Cooke about her own beliefs on serious subjects she will answer you out of the mouths of her people in The Threshold, and chiefly from the utterances of Joan Babcock—which does not mean that she makes her characters say what she wants to say to the world at large. No! It means merely that she herself has advanced no farther along the path to an answer to all these questions than Joan Babcock got. When Miss Cooke started to write The Threshold she knew, as a good novelist does, exactly what she wanted to do. She wanted to find out how a certain type of ardent young American woman feels about the future and its social and industrial problems. You ask: why didn’t she go out and, finding a woman of that type, ask her? To do that was to run risks. You might not find the young woman. She might return evasive answers or answers either intentionally or unintentionally misleading—so few of us really know what we think about anything in the future! There was just one safe and certain way to set about it, and that was to create a young woman of the sort Miss Cooke had in mind, put her in the midst of events, and see what she would say and do, what she would come to believe about the things ahead.
Miss Cooke’s The Clutch of Circumstance, on the other hand, is just a good mystery yarn about secret service work and international plots—but based on fact. It has a serious defect in that the heroine, some of whose qualities are plainly exhibited for the reader’s admiration, is guilty of atrocious treachery, becoming, in fact, a German spy!
Miss Cooke? She is going ahead, thank you! She is going ahead in the wisest way in the world for a person of her special gifts. What was said in The Threshold about Joan is the best thing to say about her author: “The world is thrust forward by such dynamic personalities as yours, even by your mistakes. There is danger in action, but more in tranquil inaction, in feeble acquiescence in the face of injustice and wrong.”
I have left untouched this chapter, written in Miss Cooke’s lifetime, because, for the readers of her books, the picture of her as she lived is the picture to remember; and for the time they are under the spell of one of her stories, the fact is without significance that, in April, 1920, while in Japan at the commencement of a world tour, Marjorie Benton Cooke died.
Books by Marjorie Benton Cooke
Modern Monologues, 1903.
Dramatic Episodes, 1905.
Plays for Children, 1905.
More Modern Monologues, 1907.
The Girl Who Lived in the Woods, 1910.
Dr. David, 1911.
Bambi, 1914.
The Dual Alliance, 1915.
Cinderella Jane, 1917.
The Threshold, 1918.
The Clutch of Circumstance, 1918.
The Cricket, 1919.
Married? 1921.