Journeying to California as a region where she might inspire her husband to begin a new life freed from old associations, she there found herself and her little family strangers in a strange city—beggars in a land of plenty. Change of sky is not change of mind. Dr. Woodhull took his habits, his wife took her necessities, and both took their misery, from East to West. In San Francisco, the girlish woman, with unrelaxed energy, and as part of that life-long heroism which will one day have its monument, set herself to supporting the man by whom she ought to have been supported. A morning journal had an advertisement—"A cigar girl wanted." The wife, with her face of sweet sixteen, presented herself as the first candidate, and was accepted on the spot. The proprietor was a stalwart Californian—one of those men who catch from a new country something of the liberality which the sailor brings from the sea. She served for one day behind his counter—blushing, modest, and sensitive, her ears tingling at every rude remark by every uncouth customer—and at nightfall her employer, who had noticed the blood coming and going in her cheeks, said to her, "My little lady, you are not the clerk I want; I must have somebody who can rough it; you are too fine." Inquiring into her case, he was surprised to find her married and a mother. At first he discredited this information, but there was no denying the truth of her story. He accompanied her to her husband, and as the two men discovered themselves to each other as brother free-masons, he gave his fair clerk of a day a twenty-dollar gold piece, and dismissed her with his blessing. And I hope this has been revisited on his own head.
Resorting to her needle, she carried from house to house this only weapon which many women possess wherewith to fight the battle of life. She chanced to come upon Anna Cogswell, the actress, who wanted a sempstress to make her a theatrical wardrobe. The winsome dressmaker was engaged at once. But her earnings at this new calling did not keep pace with her expenses. "It is no use," said she to her dramatic friend; "I am running behindhand. I must do something better." "Then," replied the actress, "you too must be an actress." And, nothing loth to undertake anything new and difficult, Victoria, who never before had dreamed of such a possibility, was engaged as a lesser light to the Cogswell star. For a first appearance, she was cast in the part of the "Country Cousin" in "New York by Gaslight." The text was given to her in the morning, she learned and rehearsed it during the day, and made a fair hit in it at night. For six weeks thereafter, she earned fifty-two dollars a week as an actress.
"Never leave the stage," said some of her fellow-performers, all of whom admired her simplicity and spirituality. "But I do not care for the stage," she said, "and I shall leave it at the first opportunity. I am meant for some other fate. But what it is, I know not."
It came—as all things have came to her—through the agency of spirits. One night while on the boards, clad in a pink silk dress and slippers, acting in the ballroom scene in the "Corsican Brothers," suddenly a spirit-voice addressed her, saying, "Victoria, come home!" Thrown instantly into clairvoyant condition, she saw a vision of her young sister Tennie, then a mere child—standing by her mother, and both calling the absent one to return. Her mother and Tennie were then in Columbus, Ohio. She saw Tennie distinctly enough to notice that she wore a striped French calico frock. "Victoria come home!" said the little messenger, beckoning with her childish forefinger. The apparition would not be denied. Victoria, thrilled and chilled by the vision and voice, burst away at a bound behind the scenes, and without waiting to change her dress, ran, clad with all her dramatic adornments, through a foggy rain to her hotel, and packing up her few things that night, betook herself with her husband and child next morning to the steamer bound for New York. On the voyage she was thrown into such vivid spiritual states, that she produced a profound excitement among the passengers. On reaching her mother's home, she came upon Tennie dressed in the same dress as in the vision; and on inquiring the meaning of the message, "Victoria, come home!" was told that at the time it was uttered, her mother had said to Tennie, "My dear, send the spirits after Victoria to bring her home;" and moreover the French calico dress had appeared to her spirit-sight at the very first moment its wearer had put it on.
This homeward trip, and its consequences, marked a new phase in her career—a turning point in her life.
Hitherto her clairvoyant faculty had been put to no pecuniary use, but she was now directed by the spirits to repair to Indianapolis, there to announce herself as a medium, and to treat patients for the cure of disease. Taking rooms in the Bates House, and publishing a card in the journals, she found herself able, on saluting her callers, to tell by inspiration their names, their residences, and their maladies. In a few days she became the town's talk. Her marvellous performances in clairvoyance being noised abroad, people flocked to her from a distance. Her rooms were crowded and her purse grew fat. She reaped a golden harvest—including, as its worthiest part, golden opinions from all sorts of people. Her countenance would often glow as with a sacred light, and she became an object of religious awe to many wonder-stricken people whose inward lives she had revealed. Moreover, her unpretentious modesty, and her perpetual disclaimer of any merit or power of her own, and the entire crediting of this to spirit-influence, augmented the interest with which all spectators regarded the amiable prodigy. First at Indianapolis, and afterward at Terre Haute, she wrought some apparently miraculous cures. She straightened the feet of the lame; she opened the ears of the deaf; she detected the robbers of a bank; she brought to light hidden crimes; she solved physiological problems; she unveiled business secrets; she prophecied future events. Knowing the wonders which she wrought, certain citizens disguised themselves and came to her purporting to be strangers from a distant town, but she instantly said, "Oh, no; you all live here." "How can you tell?" they asked. "The spirits say so," she replied.
Benedictions followed her; gifts were lavished upon her; money flowed in a stream toward her. Journeying from city to city in the practice of her spiritual art, she thereby supported all her relatives far and near. Her income in one year reached nearly a hundred thousand dollars. She received in one day, simply as fees for cures which she had wrought, five thousand dollars. The sum total of the receipts of her practice, and of her investments growing out of it, up to the time of its discontinuance by direction of the spirits in 1869, was $700,000. The age of wonders has not ceased!
During all this period, though outwardly prosperous, she was inwardly wretched. The dismal fact of her son's half-idiocy so preyed upon her mind that, in a heat of morbid feeling, she fell to accusing her innocent self for his misfortunes. The sight of his face rebuked her, until, in brokenness of spirit, she prayed to God for another child—a daughter, to be born with a fair body and a sound mind. Her prayer was granted, but not without many accompaniments of inhumanity. Once during her carriage of her unborn charge, she was kicked by its father in a fit of drunkenness—inflicting a bruise on her body and a greater bruise to her spirit. Profound as her double suffering was, in its lowest depth there was a deeper still. She was plunged into this at the child's birth. This event occurred at No. 53 Bond Street, New York, April 23d, 1861. She and her husband were at the time the only occupants of the house—her trial coming upon her while no nurse, or servant, or other human helper was under the roof. The babe entered the world at four o'clock in the morning, handled by the feverish and unsteady hands of its intoxicated father, who, only half in possession of his professional skill, cut the umbilical cord too near the flesh and tied it so loose that the string came off—laid the babe in its mother's arms—in an hour afterward left them asleep and alone—and then staggered out of the house. Nor did he remember to return. Meanwhile, the mother, on waking, was startled to find that her head on the side next to her babe's body was in a pool of blood—that her hair was soaked and clotted in a little red stream oozing drop by drop from the bowels of the child. In her motherly agony, reaching a broken chair-rung which happened to be lying near, she pounded against the wall to summon help from the next house. At intervals for several hours she continued this pounding, no one answering—until at length one of the neighbors, a resolute woman, who was attracted toward the noise, but unable to get in at the front-door, removed the grating of the basement, and made her way up stairs to the rescue of the mother and her babe. On the third day after, the mother, on sitting propped in her bed and looking out of the window, caught sight of her husband staggering up the steps of a house across the way, mistaking it for his own!
It was this horrible experience that first awoke her mind to the question, "Why should I any longer live with this man?" Hitherto she had entertained an almost superstitious idea of the devotion with which a wife should cling to her husband. She had always been so faithful to him that, in his cups, he would mock and jeer at her fidelity, and call her a fool for maintaining it. At length the fool grew wiser, and after eleven years of what, with conventional mockery, was called a marriage—during which time her husband had never spent an evening with her at home, had seldom drawn a sober breath, and had spent on other women, not herself, all the money he had ever earned—she applied in Chicago for a divorce, and obtained it.
Previous to this crisis, there had occurred a remarkable incident which more than ever confirmed her faith in the guardianship of spirits. One day, during a severe illness of her son, she left him to visit her patients, and on her return was startled with the news that the boy had died two hours before. "No," she exclaimed, "I will not permit his death." And with frantic energy she stripped her bosom naked, caught up his lifeless form, pressed it to her own, and sitting thus, flesh to flesh, glided insensibly into a trance in which she remained seven hours; at the end of which time she awoke, a perspiration started from his clammy skin, and the child that had been thought dead was brought back again to life—and lives to this day in sad half-death. It is her belief that the spirit of Jesus Christ brooded over the lifeless form, and re-wrought the miracle of Lazarus for a sorrowing woman's sake.