Furnald Hall

Furnald Hall is the former law-student dormitory at Columbia University where Willie Keith begins his Navy midshipman training. More than a backdrop, it is the threshold between the civilian life he leaves behind and the demanding, rule-bound institution he enters: within its rooms and corridors, Willie is absorbed into military routines, measured by demerits, and finally given orders that direct him toward service at sea.

Identity and Entrance

The building is introduced as a place newly repurposed for naval training. On the day he reports, Willie walks past the School of Journalism and down to the entrance, still in a brown raglan coat and green pork-pie hat. A grizzled Navy chief stands in the doorway with mimeographed papers. Willie briefly wonders whether to salute, then decides the gesture would look out of place in his civilian clothes. The chief hands him four sheets and wishes him luck, describing the moment as the start of a new life.

That transition is rendered as both ordinary and uncanny. Willis Seward Keith steps across the threshold from the sunshine into Furnald Hall, and the narration compares his passage to Alice stepping through the looking glass into a strange world. The image gives the building a double function: it is a real dormitory and administrative center, but also the boundary through which Willie enters a changed system of identity, conduct, and obligation. Mrs. Keith sees him disappear inside and runs back to the entrance, only to be stopped by the chief, who tells her there is no admittance. The door separates mother and son at the same instant that it admits Willie to Navy life.

Daily Life and Shared Quarters

Training at Furnald Hall is organized around abrupt collective movement. One day brings bugles, assemblies, dismissals, reassemblies, announcements, marches, lectures, and aptitude tests. When administrators remember instructions omitted from the mimeographed sheets, another bugle call sends five hundred sailors swarming out of the building. An ensign announces the new direction from the steps; the men are dismissed, then the building seems to draw them back inside. Military administration repeatedly empties and refills the dormitory, making its corridors part of a larger system of schedules and commands.

The physical arrangement adds its own demands. The men on the top floor call it the tenth deck, but the elevator cannot carry them all. They scramble down nine flights of stairs, then wait for a ride back up or climb again. After one such day Willie is stumbling with fatigue by the time the men are marched to dinner. Food restores him, but the contrast between exhaustion and appetite makes the school’s routine tangible: even movement through the building is collective, tiring, and regulated by circumstances beyond any one midshipman’s control.

The quarters also bring together young men whose backgrounds and habits differ. Back in their room, Willie, Roland Keefer, and another roommate exchange identities. Roland is the son of a West Virginian politician and had worked in a state personnel bureau before the war. Willie says that he had been a nightclub pianist; when he adds that he graduated from Princeton University, the conversation falls quiet. Their shared room creates an intimacy Willie says he had never experienced even within his own family. At night, amid bare yellow-painted walls edged in black wood, shelves of books, and the other men climbing into their cots, he feels both an adventurous coziness and regret for the freedom he has lost. He has spent the day without thinking of May Wynn or his parents, and the emotional distance feels far greater than the physical distance from home.

Inspection and Discipline

Furnald’s military order extends beyond the classroom and into public display. For a Sunday review, its midshipmen join those from Johnson Hall and John Jay Hall, assembling as part of a force of twenty-five hundred novice naval officers. In dress blues, with rifles, leggings, and gun belts, they are inspected individually. Small defects bring demerits: a mark on a collar, insufficiently polished shoes, or hair considered slightly too long. A flick on the back of Willie’s neck adds five demerits, bringing his total to twenty-five; the nearest competitor has seven. The numerical distance isolates him within the school’s system of inspection, where appearance is recorded and ranked as part of military performance.

The review turns that same system into spectacle. A sixty-piece midshipmen’s band plays, colors wave, and bayonets catch the morning light as the ranks march onto South Field. Hundreds of spectators watch from behind the wire fences. Individually, the midshipmen are frightened young men trying not to attract notice; together, their ordered ranks suggest a power they do not yet possess separately. Furnald is therefore connected not only to the small-scale correction of individual bodies, but also to the Navy’s public presentation of its new officers as a disciplined collective.

The demerit system has consequential force. After three new offenses are added to Willie’s existing twenty-five, a school official tells him that the total puts him out of school. The official regrets that Navy rules have placed him in this position, but insists that the penalties have been carefully weighed and that a man unable to remain within their limits should not be in the Navy. Furnald’s rules are presented as rational and impersonal, yet their effect on Willie is immediate: accumulated marks threaten to end his training before it has properly begun.

Orders and Narrative Significance

Near graduation, the tenth-floor midshipmen continue studying even though their marks have been totaled and nothing can change them. The routine has become a pretense, interrupted when the word “Orders!” sends men crowding to their doors. A messenger brings envelopes for two men in Willie’s room, but says Willie’s orders are delayed and another batch is coming. Roland opens his own envelope and celebrates his assignment to Staff, Pacific. Willie congratulates him, while his own future remains temporarily suspended.

That delay makes Furnald the last setting in which Willie waits as a trainee before his Navy destination is fixed. The building has taken him in, subjected him to its cycles of movement and inspection, and placed him among shipmates whose lives are also being assigned outward. Its significance lies in the contrast between the apparent smallness of its rooms and the scale of the institution they serve: at Furnald, a doorway, a staircase, a dress inspection, or an envelope can mark a change in belonging or prospect. The looking-glass threshold that first separated Willie from his mother thus opens onto an organized world in which private identity is tested against collective discipline and official judgment.