Chapter 15: Mister, Listen to Me [4]
Chapter 15: Mister, Listen to Me [4]
For a while, the conversation continued in a way that made me want to retch.
Gloves... I need gloves.
My longing for gloves was not something that kind of talk could weaken.
Fortunately, my senior was also showing tremendous interest.
“Condoms... I know what they are too. But people hardly use them. They’re inconvenient. Still, if they could be made properly... hmm.”
“I’m telling you, it would be huge. They could prevent venereal disease too.”
“Y-yeah, that’s right. They could prevent venereal disease too.”
“And they work for contraception.”
“Right, right. This can work. This can make money. You’re saying gloves can just be made on the side, right?”
“That’s right.”
“The fact that they use the same material is a little awkward... but still, good. Let’s go for now. I need to speak to Father.”
With that, we headed toward a place that ought to have been called a gambling house rather than a banquet hall.
Joseph ended up coming along too.
“The more I hear about it, the more it does sound good. If illegitimate children can be reduced... then the Lord would also...”
Like a proper Quaker, he was invoking the Lord.
It was not a bad thing.
Everyone here would probably be invoking the Lord too.
It was a little strange, given that the British Empire itself stood atop other people’s blood, but in any case, that was the kind of era this was.
“Ugh.”
The place we arrived at was truly just a gambling house.
Everyone had a pipe in his mouth, puffing out smoke, and unlike an ordinary social gathering, there were no women at all.
This is actually better.
That worked out well for me.
I had never gone to one, but I had heard about them.
I knew what the social gatherings held in the London countryside around this time were like.
Given the era, it was not just nobles who attended. Ordinary people who had made money showed up too, but I had heard the discrimination was unbelievable.
And an Easterner would go there?
Unless they lied and called me Noble Kim, I could get beaten to death.
“Show it.”
“You first.”
“Oh, come on. Show it, will you?”
I had heard that they discriminated through language there too.
Not all English was the same English, and the English Joseph and I spoke was, naturally, the English used by commoners.
If we spoke like that there, they would probably assume we were servants and order us to do something.
But the English being spoken here was unbelievably cheap.
“Are you bluffing?”
“I’m not. If you’re scared, then go die.”
Was that not the kind of conversation you would expect in some back alley, not in an upper-class household?
Because of that, I felt more and more at ease.
Yes, this was much better.
If people got all stiff and gathered together acting refined, there would be no way to talk about something like Condoms.
“Father.”
For all that talk of going to die if you were scared, it had been a complete bluff.
My senior’s father, the man behind it, had just lost all his money and was chewing furiously on his pipe.
Seizing that moment, my senior stepped forward.
Naturally, savage eyes turned toward him.
“Did you come to greet us?”
For a second, I thought he was about to throw a punch, but fortunately, a normal sentence came out.
He clearly had unusual nerve.
Then again, that was how he had already become a merchant traveling between East and West in this era.
He was not even giving me strange looks.
Compared to that...
Hmm.
No, the whole gathering seemed to be the same.
There were five men seated at the table.
If this had been on the street, all five of them would probably have stared at me like I was some monkey in a zoo.
But the people here were not curious about me myself. They were curious about how I had ended up here.
“Oh. Won’t you introduce him? Who exactly is this young man?”
“Is he from Qing? But his hairstyle looks completely like one of ours.”
“No, is he Japanese? They sometimes wear their hair like this over there.”
That was only natural.
The Opium War had not even broken out yet.
Of course, some merchants had already started thinking, Aren’t those Qing fellows kind of... pushovers? but the overall image Qing still carried was that of a great power.
Japan?
It was still far too early for the Meiji Restoration.
That was the context in which people in London were looking at an Easterner, so in a way, this reaction was only natural.
“Ah, he’s from Joseon. Born here... no, no. He is a noble who came to learn about the culture of this side, or so I’ve heard.”
My senior’s father nearly revealed my true background, then remembered the cover identity we had agreed on and changed his words.
At that, everyone looked as if they understood.
“Joseon. I’ve heard of it. Isn’t it the country near Qing?”
“Ginseng. I’ve bought ginseng before.”
Now that I looked, they really were all merchants.
Then again, neither my senior nor his father looked like nobles.
They were probably newly rich.
So the nobles likely would not associate with them.
“We didn’t come just to greet you. There’s something we wish to say from a business standpoint...”
Taking advantage of the favorable attention now falling on me, my senior opened the topic.
“But we’re busy.”
At that, the gambler who had just lost money, meaning Father, shoved my senior aside.
It made me wonder just how many worthless ideas he usually came up with.
Or maybe he had simply lost a great deal of money.
In any case, my senior was pushed back.
I wondered if I should step in.
“Wait, wait. What if it’s about trade with Joseon?”
“Joseon? That won’t work, will it? Don’t you know the Providence?”
“I know it, sure. But how many decades has it been since then?”
“Yes, that’s true too.”
The Providence.
Sorry, but I had never heard of it before.
It made me think I should stay very, very quiet.
I really should have gone back and studied history again whenever I had the time.
I had studied Korean history too.
It had been on the college entrance exam.
But...
Is it Sunjo right now, or Heonjong?
I was at the level of not even being sure who the current king was.
Someone might wonder how I still became a doctor like that, but I had become the kind of person who forgot that because I had studied medicine that intensely.
And not only that, I had even become a professor, so it was better to assume that my head was filled with nothing but medical knowledge and experience.
Around the time I was desperately piling up excuses for my own ignorance in my head, my senior continued.
“This friend is a noble from Joseon, so perhaps that could be discussed later as well... but that’s not what this is about. Of course, this was his idea. If you hear him out... I believe every one of you will rush to invest.”
In the dissection room, he cut his finger, but here he was showing a surprisingly decisive side.
The others must have thought so too, because all eyes turned to him.
Even the gambler who had lost money shifted his body and began tilting his head in interest.
“Have you heard of Condoms?”
“Condoms?”
“I’ve heard of them.”
“Aren’t they just something passed around by butchers? There’s no profit in that.”
A cold reaction came back immediately.
That let me see what Condoms were thought of in this era.
Even my senior looked a little flustered.
So he looked at me.
This bastard...
Well.
For a man who cut his finger during dissection, he had done well enough by drawing this much attention.
Anyway, if it was medical knowledge, was it not only right for me to step in?
“Greetings. I am Taepyeong Kim from Joseon. You may call me Pyeong.”
“Ahhh.”
“His English is really good.”
“He sounds like a native speaker.”
The mood reversed.
Would there even be many Easterners with English this good even in the twenty-first century?
Unless they were immigrants, it would be difficult.
And foreigners who spoke your language well were always easier to like.
The moment one clear difference disappeared, it was only natural that the atmosphere changed.
“Speaking as a student of medicine... Condoms are extremely important. Their only advantage is not merely preventing illegitimate children. They can also prevent venereal disease. All of you here must be closely connected to sailors... and there are probably quite a lot of men who catch venereal diseases and end up ruined because of them.”
In that atmosphere, I let my imagination spread.
No, it was not imagination.
I had actually thought about this before as I got older and thought back on the Age of Exploration.
Could anyone really call himself a student of medicine if he never once thought that sailors must have been hotbeds for diseases from all over, especially venereal disease?
“Hmm.”
“Certainly... syphilis and gonorrhea do run rampant.”
“Not long ago, our captain also... retired. His mind was no longer sound.”
The reason I had thought that was because diseases like dengue fever and malaria were carried by mosquitoes, were they not?
They did not pass directly from person to person.
And more importantly, they could kill people quickly.
Venereal diseases, on the other hand, had such long histories that many of the pathogens clinging to human hosts had evolved to survive with them for a long time.
“At the very least, if sailors like those use Condoms, they will be able to prevent them. And then... look at social gatherings.”
“You mean the nobles?”
“Yes.”
My imagination stretched to the nobles as well.
It was not baseless fantasy. It was grounded speculation.
I had seen somewhere on YouTube that there was a king here in Britain who became the origin of the modern condom.
Why else would he have made one?
Because he was promiscuous.
“Even if they don’t say anything openly, they’ll buy them in secret.”
“That’s true too. They’re all just keeping quiet about it... hmm?”
“Moreover, I’ve heard there are brothels here in London.”
It was not only royalty and nobles who were promiscuous.
It was simply an age that lacked that kind of awareness.
From my point of view, this side was the bigger problem.
Of course, without antibiotics, treatment would not work anyway.
They probably could not even manage the symptoms properly.
Life was too hard for that.
“There will be enormous demand there too.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm!”
“This is good.”
At my words, everyone’s expression brightened.
And the one who began showing the greatest interest of all was my senior’s father.
“Good, very good. But what exactly do you plan to make these Condoms out of?”
He had now fully turned around in his chair to face me.
One corner of his mind was surely still lingering on the money he had just lost.
But he had begun to sense an even bigger pile of money in front of him, so that no longer seemed to matter.
If I even mention intestines, you...
Of course, I was uneasy.
He liked me because I was his son’s friend and because I seemed knowledgeable about medicine.
But expecting more than that from a Joseon-born boy raised here would be unreasonable.
“Rubber.”
“Rubber...?”
To begin with, the answer missed expectations by a wide margin.
“Rubber...?”
Rubber.
Yes, I had heard it was soft.
But once processed into something usable, it became stiff again.
That was why it was barely sought after as a raw material.
Its price?
Practically nothing.
“Yes. If you think about it, rubber is waterproof, isn’t it? That means it does not get wet... and that is an enormous advantage. If it gets wet, then when there is friction like this, it will slip off much more easily. It must not get wet.”
“Is that so? I’ve never really thought about it that deeply.”
Right, neither had I until yesterday.
That was what I meant when I said I had never meditated on Condoms before.
But yesterday, I had spent almost the whole night thinking about Condoms.
“Look. If paper gets wet... what use would it be? That is why they made them from animal intestines.”
“I see. Yes, certainly... they are tough, too...”
“The point is, if it can just be made thin and soft, this will be a massive success.”
“Hmm... do you know how to do that?”
“No. You should pay a chemist to figure it out.”
“You’re awfully shameless.”
“I’m only providing the idea.”
“But I like it. It sounds plausible. Certainly... this much... hmm. I think this could work.”