house? The Nabhan house in Sahtouf belong to us." — The house of Nabhan are your protégés, our master the Sheikh. Do us the honor of stepping inside, Sheikh Ajjaj.
And the Sheikh cast his gaze around the establishment and discovered something that had not shown from outside: that the store had four floors, and that the building which housed it bore the name "Hasib Nabhan" — it was his property. Silence settled over the two of them until the Sheikh opened his mouth and graced the store's owner with this question: "Your father was the watchman of our properties?" — Aye, he was the watchman of your honor's properties, our master the Sheikh.
Hasib might be gracious in his talk, and bow to sheikhly rank; but that unlettered, self-made man, the watchman's son, who had come to Manila with nothing in his pocket but his passport, and who now owned the biggest store and spread his name across several buildings, was no simpleton. He had talked with his sheikh but a few minutes before he knew the truth of Sheikh Ajjaj's condition, and to what poverty and misery he had come. So Hasib circled his guest in a verbal maneuver and brought him to condescend so far as to ask the watchman's son about the state of trade; whereupon the latter hastened to complain and grumble of the stagnation of business, the standstill of work, and the fierceness of competition. The Sheikh took alarm, supposing his interlocutor had begun preparing excuses against coming to his aid; but he recovered his calm on hearing Hasib beg him to buy something from the store, to be entered against him "on account." And the merchant walked that "customer" — the Sheikh — about, and "sold" him a few suits and shirts and shoes and handkerchiefs and socks, and called to the clerk to open an account in the name of Sheikh Ajjaj Jadallah, and to charge against it the price of all he had bought. And he thanked the Sheikh for that windfall, for but for it, the merchant Hasib Nabhan's day would have been a slack day indeed. Then the talk wandered on, and Hasib gently gave his sheikh to understand
that, what with the stagnation of business and the difficulty of putting money to work, cash had piled up in his hands, and the bank would pay him no more than two percent interest on his money; and that the Sheikh would
be doing Hasib a kindness if he borrowed from him a few hundred riyals at better interest than 2 percent. Sheikh Ajjaj bowed his head in thought and said, very well — bring five hundred dollars and make out a promissory note for
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Showroom: the Dunlop Company, telephone 18/78, Bab Idriss, Capuchin Street